and gave Him room to grow.  Just as the infant nation was unawares fostered in the very lap of the country which was the symbol of the world hostile to God, so the infant Christ was guarded and grew there.  The prophecy is a prophecy just because it is history; for the history was all a shadow of the future, and He is the true Israel and the Son of God.  It would have been fulfilled quite as really, that is to say, the parallel between Christ and the nation would have been as fully carried out, if His place of refuge had been in some other land; but the precise outward identity helps to point the parallel to unobservant eyes.  The great truth taught by it of the typical relation between the nation and the Person is the key to large regions of Old Testament history and prophecy.  Rightly, therefore, does Matthew call our attention to this pregnant fact, and bid us see in the divine selection of the place where the young life of God manifest in the flesh was sheltered, a fulfilment of prophecy.  Egypt was the natural asylum of every fugitive from Palestine, but a deeper reason bent the steps of the Holy Family to the shelter of its palms and temples.

II.  The slaughter of the innocents, and the prophecy fulfilled therein.—­Herod’s fierce rage, enflamed by the dim suspicion that these wily Easterns have gone away laughing in their sleeves at having tricked him, and by the dread that they may be stirring up armed defenders of the infant King, is in full accord with all that we know of him.  The critics who find the story of the massacre ‘unhistorical,’ because Josephus does not mention it, must surely be very anxious to discredit the evangelist, and very hard pressed for grounds to do so, or they would not commit themselves to the extraordinary assumption that nothing is to be believed outside of the pages of Josephus.  A splash or two of ‘blood of poor innocents,’ more or less, found on the Idumean tyrant’s bloody skirts, could be of little consequence in the eyes of those who knew what a long saturnalia of horrors his reign had been; and the number of the infants under two years old in such a tiny place as Bethlehem would be small, so that their feeble wail might well fail to reach the ears even of contemporaries.  But there is no reason for questioning the simple truth of a story so like the frantic cruelty and sleepless suspicion of the grey-headed tyrant, who was stirred to more ferocity as the shades of death gathered about him, and power slipped from his rotting hands.  Of all the tragic pictures which Scripture gives of a godless old age, burning with unquenchable hatred to goodness and condemned to failure in all its antagonism, none is touched with more lurid hues than this.  What a contrast between the king de jure, the cradled infant; and the king de facto, going down to his loathsome death, which all but he longed for!  He may well stand as a symbol of the futility of all opposition to Christ the King.

The fate of these few infants is a strange one.  In their brief lives they have won immortal fame.  They died for the Christ whom they never knew.  These lambs were slain for the sake of the Lamb who lived while