often given the order for the slaughter, and now the Idumean applied to the people who had accepted him, the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

We do not know how many of the Innocents there were, but if we can believe Macrobius we know that among them was a little son of Herod who was at nurse in Bethlehem. For the old King, wife-killer and son-killer, who knows but that this was a form of retribution: who knows but that he suffered when they brought him news of the mistake? A short time after this he also was to die, suffering from loathsome disease. His body began to putrefy while still alive. Worms consumed his organs. Burnt up with fevers, gasping, he could scarcely draw his tainted breath. Disgusting to himself, he tried to kill himself with a knife at table, and finally died, after having given Salome orders to have many young prisoners killed.

The massacre of the Innocents was the last act of the reeking, bloody old man. There is a prophetic meaning in this immolation of the Innocents around the cradle of an Innocent, this holocaust of blood for a new-born child, a child destined to offer His blood for the pardon of the guilty, this human sacrifice for One, who in His turn was to be sacrificed. After His death thousands and thousands were to die for the sole crime of having believed in His resurrection. He was born to die for others and as if to expiate His birth, behold, here are thousands born who die for Him.

There is a tremendous mystery in this blood-offering of the pure, in the death of so many of His contemporaries. They belonged to the generation which was to betray and crucify Him. But those who were killed by the soldiers of Herod that day did not see Him, did not grow up to see their Lord killed. They saved Him with their death, and saved themselves forever. They were innocent and they remained innocent for all eternity. Their fathers and their surviving brothers avenged them later, but they will be pardoned because "they know not what they do!"

THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT

A Christian poet, an Italian, sang this lullaby to the new

born Jesus:

Sleep, baby, do not weep,

Sleep, heavenly babe.

Over your head, the tempests shall not dare to rage!

But the son of Mary did not make Himself man in order to sleep, and the tempests raged, but He was not afraid.

Better than Siddharta, He deserves the name of the Awakened one. How can He sleep in the stable, where the donkey brays, precursor of all donkeys who will bray against Him: where the ox lows, waiting until the other oxen speak at His presence; where the shepherds question Him; where the wise men give Him their blessing? How can He sleep when the shuffling steps of Herod's assassins draw near? How can He ever sleep up to that last night when He will agonize under the olive trees, amid the sleeping bodies of the Eleven?

And Mary cannot sleep. In the evening as soon as the houses of Bethlehem disappear in the darkness and the first lamps are lighted, the mother steals away like a fugitive. She is snatching a life away from the King, she is saving a hope for the people as she presses upon her breast her man-child, her hope, her sorrow.

She goes towards the west, she crosses the old land of Canaan and comes by easy stages-the days are short-to the Nile, to that country of Mizraim which had cost so many tears to her ancestors fourteen centuries before.

Jesus, who carried on the work of Moses and at the same time demolished the work of Moses, goes back over the route taken by the first redeemer. When the Jews were under the whip of the Egyptian slaves, oppressed, mistreated, ill-used, the Shepherd of Median made himself the Shepherd of Israel, and led his hard-headed people across the desert till they were in sight of the Jordan and of the miraculous vineyards. The people of Jesus left Chaldea with Abraham and came with

Joseph into Egypt. Moses led them from Egypt toward Canaan. Now the greatest of the liberators, in danger of his life, went back to the banks of that river where the first Saviour had been saved from the water and had saved his brothers.

Egypt, the rich spawning-bed of all the infamies and all the magnificences of the first epoch, that African India, where the waves of history broke and died, where but a few years before, Pompey and Antony had finished the dream of Empire and of life, this prodigious country, born of water, burned by the sun, covered with the blood of many peoples, inhabited by many animal-gods, this country, paradoxical and supernatural, was by contrast the predestined asylum for the fugitive.

The wealth of Egypt was in mud, in the rich snake-breeding mud which the Nile rolled out each year upon the desert. Death was the obsession of Egypt. The soft, prosperous people of Egypt would not accept death, denied death, thought they could conquer death with graven images, with embalmings, with sculptured representation of flesh-and-blood bodies. The rich, portly Egyptian, son of mud, adorer of the sacred bull, and the dog-headed god, could not resign himself to dying. He manufactured for his second life immense necropolises full of bandaged and perfumed mummies, of images of wood and marble, and raised up pyramids over his corpses, as if stone and mortar might save them from decay.

When Jesus could speak, He was to pronounce the verdict against Egypt: the Egypt which is not only on the banks of the Nile, the Egypt which has not yet disappeared from the face of the earth along with its kings, its sparrow-hawks and its serpents. Christ was to give the final and eternal answer to the terror of the Egyptians. He was to condemn the wealth which comes from mud and returns to mud, and all the fetiches of the pot-bellied river-dwellers of the Nile, and He was to conquer death without sculptured tombs, without mortuary kingdoms, without statues of granite and basalt. His victory over death is won by teaching that sin is greedier than worms and that spiritual purity is the only aromatic which preserves from decay.

The worshipers of mud and of animals, the servants of riches and of the Beast, could not save themselves. Their tombs, high as mountains though they be, decked out like queens' palaces, white and fair to see as those of the Pharisees, guard only ashes, dust returning again to dust, even as the dead bodies of animals. Death cannot be conquered by copying life in wood and stone. Stone crumbles away and turns to dust, wood rots and turns to dust, and both of them are mud-eternal mud.

THE LOST FOUND

But the exile in Egypt was short. Jesus was brought back, held in His mother's arms, rocked throughout the long journey by the patient step of the ass, to His father's house in Nazareth, humble house and shop where the hammer pounded and the rasp scraped until the setting of the sun.

The canonical gospels say nothing of these years: the Apocrypha give many details but unworthy of belief. Luke, the wise doctor, is content to set down that the boy grew and was strong; that is, that he was not sickly and overworked. He was a boy developed as he should be: healthy, a bearer of health, as was fitting in one who was to restore health to others by the mere touch of His hand.

Every year, says Luke. the parents of Jesus went to Jerusalem for the feast of unleavened bread in memory of the escape from Egypt. They went with a crowd of neighbors, friends, and acquaintances to keep each other company on the journey. They were cheerful like people going to a festival rather than to a service in memory of a solemn crisis: for the Passover had become at Jerusalem a great feast day, when all the Jews scattered about the Empire came together.

On the twelfth Passover after the birth of Jesus, as the group from Nazareth was returning from the holy city, Mary found that her son was not with them. All day long she sought for Him, asking every acquaintance, but in vain. The next morning the mother turned back, retraced her steps over the road and went up and down the streets and open places of

Jerusalem, fixing her dark eyes on every boy she met, asking the mothers standing in the open doors, begging her countrymen not yet gone, to help her find her lost son. A mother who has lost her son does not rest until she has found him; she thinks no more of herself, she does not feel weariness, effort, hunger. She does not shake the dust from her clothes nor arrange her hair. She cares not for the curious glances of the passers-by. Her distracted eyes see nothing but the image of him, who is no longer beside her.

Finally on the third day she came to the Temple, looked about in the courts, and saw at last in the shadow of a portico a group of old men talking. She came up timidly, for those men with long cloaks and long beards seemed people of importance who would pay no attention to a plain woman from Galilee, and discovered in the center of the circle the waving hair, the shining eyes, the tanned face, the fresh lips of her Jesus. Those old men were talking with her son of the Law and the Prophets. They were asking Him questions and He was answering; He put questions to them in His turn and they marveled at Him, astonished that a boy should know the words of the Lord so well. But He remembered the books which He had heard read out in the little Synagogue of Nazareth: and His memory had retained every syllable.

Mary remained for a few moments gazing at Him, hardly believing her eyes. Her heart, a moment before beating fast with fear, was now beating fast with astonishment. But she could not restrain herself any more and suddenly in a loud voice called Him by name. The old men took themselves off and the mother snatched her son to her breast and silently clasped Him to her, the tears which she had kept back till then raining down on His face.

She clutched Him, took Him away, and then, certain that she had Him with her, that she had not lost Him, the happy mother remembered the despairing mother, "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing."

"How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"