t the young child's life,' is the encouragement to
Joseph. It sums up in one sentence the failure of the first attempt, and
is like an epitaph cut on a tombstone for a man yet living,--a prophecy
of the end of all succeeding efforts to crush Christ and thwart His
work. 'The dreaded infant's hand' is mightier than all mailed fists, or
fingers that hold a pen. Christ lives and grows; Herod rots and dies.

Apparently Joseph's intention was to return to Bethlehem. He may have
thought that Nazareth would scarcely satisfy the angel's injunction to
go to the 'Land of Israel,' or that David's city was the right home for
David's heir. At all events, his perplexity appeals to Heaven for
direction; and, for the fourth time, his course is marked for him by a
dream, whether through the instrumentality of the angel who knew the way
to his couch so well, we are not told, Archelaus, Herod's son, who had
received Judaea on the partition at his father's death, was a smaller
Herod, as cruel and less able. There was more security in the obscurity
of Nazareth, under the less sanguinary sway of Antipas, whose share of
his father's vices was his lust, rather than his ferocity. So, after so
many wanderings, and with such strange new experience and thoughts, the
silent, steadfast Joseph and the meek mother bring back their mysterious
charge and secret to the humble old home. Matthew does not seem to have
known that it had formerly been their home, but his account is no
contradiction of Luke's.

Again he is reminded of a prophecy, or perhaps, rather, of many
prophecies, for he uses the plural 'prophets,' as if he were summing up
the tenor of more than one utterance. The words which he gives are not
found in any prophet. But we know that to call a man 'a Nazarene' was
the same thing as to call him lowly and despised. The scoff of the
Pharisee to Nicodemus's timid appeal on Christ's behalf, and the
guileless Nathaniel's quest ion, show that. The fact that Christ by His
residence in Nazareth became known as the 'Nazarene,' and so shared in
the contempt attaching to all Galileans, and especially to the
inhabitants of that village, is a kind of concentration of all the
obscurity and ignominy of His lot. The name was nailed over His head on
the cross as a scornful _reductio ad absurdum_ of His claims to be King
of Israel This explanation of the evangelist's meaning does not exclude
a reference in his mind to the prophecy in Isaiah xi. 1, where Messiah