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One has three or four eggs still warm from the nest, another a cup of freshly drawn milk, another a little cheese, another a pullet to make broth for the new mother. A new being has begun his suffering: the neighbors hasten to carry their offerings almost as though to console the mother.

Themselves poor the old-time shepherds did not look down on the poor. Simple as children they loved children. They came of a race born of the Shepherd of Ur, saved by the Shepherd of Madian. Their first kings had been shepherds-Saul and David-shepherds of herds before being shepherds of tribes. But these shepherds of Bethlehem, "unknown to the hard world," were not proud. A poor man was born among them and they looked on Him with affection and lovingly brought Him their poor riches. They knew that this boy, born of poor people in poverty, born of common people in the midst of common people, was to be the redeemer of the humble, of those men of good will, on whom the Angel had called down peace.

THE WISE MEN

Some days after this, three wise men came from Chaldea and knelt before Jesus. They came perhaps from Ecbatana, perhaps from the shores of the Caspian Sea. Mounted on their camels with their full-stuffed saddle-bags, they had forded the Tigris and the Euphrates, crossed the great desert of the nomad tribes, followed along the Dead Sea. They were guided to Judea by a new star like the comet which appears every so often in the sky to announce the birth of a prophet or the death of a Cæsar. They had come to adore a King, and they found a nursing baby, poorly swaddled, hidden within a stable. Almost a thousand years before this, a Queen of the East had come on a pilgrimage to Judea, and she, too, had carried gifts, gold, fragrant perfumes and precious stones; but she had found on the throne the greatest king who had ever reigned in Jerusalem and from him had learned what no one else had been able to teach her.

The wise men found no king. They found a new-born baby, a tiny boy, who could neither ask nor answer questions,

a boy who in His maturity was to disdain material treasures, and the learning which is based on material things.

They were not kings, these wise men, but in Media and Persia they were the masters of kings. The kings ruled over the people, but the wise men directed the kings. They alone could communicate with Alma Mazda, the good God. They alone knew the future, and Destiny. They killed with their own hands the enemies of men and of the harvests, snakes, harmful insects, birds of prey. They purified souls, they purified the fields. Except from their hands God accepted no sacrifices. No king began a war without consulting them. Theirs were the secrets of heaven and earth. In the name of science and religion they held first rank in the nation. In the midst of a people sunk in material things they represented the Spirit. It was fitting that they should come to kneel before Jesus. After the animals which are Nature, after the Shepherds which are the common people, this third power which is knowledge knelt at the manger in Bethlehem. The old priestly caste of the Orient made its act of submission before the new Lord, who was to send His Gospel to the west. The learned men knelt before Him who was to set above the learning of words and numbers the new wisdom of love.

Symbolizing the old theology bowing before the final revelation, the wise men at Bethlehem knelt before Innocence: Wealth prostrated itself at the feet of Poverty.

They offered gold to Jesus: gold which He was to tread under foot. They offered it not because Mary in her poverty might need it for the journey, but in anticipation of the command, "Sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor." They offered Him frankincense, not to drown the stench of the stable, but as a token that their own ritual was ended; that their altars would need smoke and perfume no longer. They offered Him myrrh knowing that this boy would die young, and His mother, smiling now, would need spices to embalm the dead body.

Kneeling in their pontifical robes upon the bedding of straw, they, the mighty, the learned, the soothsayers, offered themselves as pledges of the obedience of the world.

Jesus now had received all His rightful investitures. The wise men had scarcely gone when persecutions were begun by those who were to hate Him to the day of His death.

OCTAVIUS AUGUSTUS

When Christ appeared upon the earth, criminals ruled the world unopposed. He was born subject to two sovereigns, the stronger far away at Rome, the weaker and wickeder close at hand in Judea.

One lucky adventurer after wholesale slaughter had seized the empire, another had murdered his way to the throne of David and Solomon. Each rose to high position through trickery, through civil wars, betrayals, cruelty, massacres. They were born to understand one another, were, as a matter of fact, friends and accomplices, as far as was possible between a subordinate rascal and his rascal chief.

Son of the usurer of Velletri, Augustus showed himself cowardly in war and vindictive in victory, false to his friends, cruel in reprisals. To a condemned man who begged only for burial he answered, "That is the business of the vultures." To the Perugians begging for mercy during the massacre he cried, "Moriendum esse!" On a mere suspicion he wanted to tear out the eyes of the Praetor Quintus Gallius before ordering his throat cut. Possessed of the empire, with his enemies crushed and scattered, with the power all in his own hands, he put on a mask of mildness and of his youthful vices kept only his lust. It was told of him, that in his youth, he had sold his body twice, first to Cæsar, and again in Spain to Hirtius for 300,000 sestertia. Now he amused himself with the wives of his friends, with almost public adulteries, and with posing as the restorer of morality.

This filthy, sickly man was sovereign of the western world when Jesus was born, nor did he ever know that One had been born who would bring the dissolution of all that he had founded. The facile philosophy of the plump little plagiarist Horace was enough for him, "To-day let us enjoy wine and love: hopeless death awaits us: there is not a day to be lost!" In vain Virgil,

the man of the countryside, friend of woods, of quiet flocks and golden bees, he who had gone down with Æneas to see the sufferers in Avernus and poured his restless melancholy into the music of poetry; in vain Virgil, the loving pious Virgil, had foretold a new era, a new order and a new race, a kingdom of heaven less spiritual, less brilliant than that which Jesus was to announce, but infinitely nobler and purer than the kingdom of Hell which was then making ready. In vain, because Augustus saw in these words only a pastoral fancy and perhaps believed that he, the corrupt master of the corrupt, was the proclaimed Saviour and restorer of the reign of Saturn.

But his vassal of Judea, his great Oriental client, may have had a presentiment of the birth of Jesus, of the true King, who was coming to supplant the king of evil,

HEROD THE GREAT

Herod was a monster, one of the most perfidious monsters of the many which have sprung from the burning deserts of the East. He was not a Jew, nor a Greek, nor a Roman. He was an Idumean, a barbarian who prostrated himself before Rome, and aped the Greeks the better to secure his dominion over the Jews. Son of a traitor, he had usurped the kingdom of his sovereign from the last unfortunate Hasmonæans. To legalize his treachery he married their niece, Mariamne. Afterwards, on a baseless suspicion, he had her killed. It was not his first crime. He had had his brother-in-law, Aristobulus, treacherously drowned. He had condemned his other brothersin-law, Joseph and Hyrcanus the Second (last of the conquered dynasty). Not content with having killed Mariamne, he put her mother, Alexandra, to death as well, and finally, the sons of Baba, merely because they were distant relatives of the Hasmonæans. In the meantime he amused himself with burning alive Juda of Sarafaus and Matthew of Margoloth with other heads of the Pharisees. Later, afraid that the sons he had had by Mariamne would wish to avenge their mother, he had them strangled. Himself at the point of death he gave the order to kill a third son, Archelaus. Voluptuous, suspicious,

impious, greedy of gold and of glory, he never knew peace at home, in Judea or in his own heart. In order that he might bury the recollection of his assassinations he gave the Roman people a present of three hundred talents to spend in festivals. He humiliated himself before Augustus to make him the accomplice of his infamies and, dying, left him ten thousand drachmas and, in addition, a ship of gold and one of silver for Livia.

This half-civilized Arab attempted to conciliate the Greeks and the Jews. He succeeded in bribing the degenerate posterity of Socrates so that in Athens they put up a statue to him, but the Jews hated him to the day of his death. It did him no good, in their eyes, to build up Samaria and restore the temple of Jerusalem. He was always, for them, the heathen and the usurper.

Apprehensive like all ageing evil-doers, and like all newmade princes, he shivered at every fluttering leaf, every shifting shadow. Superstitious like all Orientals, credulous of presages and soothsayers, he readily believed the three wise men when they said, that led by a star, they had come from the interior of Chaldea towards the country which he had fraudulently stolen. Any pretender to the throne, even a fantastic one, could make him tremble, and when he knew from the wise men that a King of Judea was born, his uneasy, barbarian's heart gave a great leap of fear. Seeing that the astrologers did not come back to tell him the place where the new nephew of David had appeared, he ordered that all the boy babies of Bethlehem should be killed.

THE INNOCENTS

Nobody ever knew how many children were sacrificed to the terror of Herod. It was not the first time in Judea that even nursing children had been put to the sword. This same Hebrew people had punished in the olden times cities of their enemies by the massacre of the old men, the wives, the young men and the boys. They saved only the virgins to make them slaves and concubines. God Himself, the jealous Jehovah, had

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