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SIMPLICITY OF THE GOSPELS.

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this is wide of the reality. Such glories as the simple shepherds saw were seen only by the eye of faith; and all which met their gaze was a peasant of Galilee, already beyond the prime of life, and a young mother, of whom they could not know that she was wedded maid and virgin wife, with an Infant Child, whom, since there were none to help her, her own hands had wrapped in swaddlingclothes. The light that shined in the darkness was no physical, but a spiritual beam; the Dayspring from on high, which had now visited mankind, dawned only in a few faithful and humble hearts.1

And the Gospels, always truthful and bearing on every page that simplicity which is the stamp of honest narrative, indicate this fact without comment. There is in them nothing of the exuberance of marvel, and mystery, and miracle, which appears alike in the Jewish imaginations about their coming Messiah, and in the apocryphal narratives about the Infant Christ. There is no more decisive criterion of their absolute credibility as simple histories, than the marked and violent contrast which they offer to all the spurious gospels of the early centuries, and all the imaginative legends which have clustered about them. Had our Gospels been unauthentic, they too must inevitably have partaken of the characteristics which mark, without exception, every early fiction about the Saviour's life. To the unilluminated fancy it would have seemed incredible that the most stupendous event in the world's history should have taken place without convulsions and catastrophes.

1 The apocryphal Gospels, with their fondness for circumstantiality, and their readiness on all occasions to invent imaginary names, say that there were four shepherds, and that their names were Misael, Acheel, Cyriacus, and Stephanus (see Hofmann, Leben Jesu nach den Apokryphen, p. 117). The little village of Beit-Sahur is pointed out as their native place.

In the Gospel of St. James1 there is a really striking chapter, describing how, at the awful moment of the nativity, the pole of the heaven stood motionless, and the birds were still, and there were workmen lying on the earth with their hands in a vessel, "and those who handled did not handle it, and those who took did not lift, and those who presented it to their mouth did not present it, but the faces of all were looking up; and I saw the sheep scattered and the sheep stood, and the shepherd lifted up his hand to strike, and his hand remained up; and I looked at the stream of the river, and the mouths of the kids were down, and were not drinking; and everything which was being propelled forward was intercepted in its course." But of this sudden hush and pause of awe-struck Nature,2 of the parhelions and mysterious splendours which blazed in many places of the world, of the painless childbirth,3 of the perpetual virginity, of the ox and the ass kneeling to worship Him in the manger, of the voice with which immediately after His birth He told His mother that He was the Son

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1 Commonly known as the Protevangelium, ch. xviii.

2 "Credibile est in aliis partibus mundi aliqua indicia nativitatis Christi apparuisse" (S. Thom. Aquin., Summa iii. qu. 36, art. 3. Hofmann, p. 115, seqq.)

3 "Nulla ibi obstetrix, nulla muliercularum sedulitas intercessit" (Jer. Adv. Helvid.), probably with reference to Ps. xxii. 9—“Thou art He who tookest me out of my mother's womb." This is, however, involved in Luke ii. 7, ἐσπαργάνωσεν.

4" Virgo ante partum, in partu, post partum" (Aug. Serm. 123). "Claustrum pudoris permanet" (Ambros. De Adv. Dom. 10). This was a mere fantastic inference from Ezek. xliv. 2. (See Jer. Taylor, Life of Christ, ed. Eden, p. 65, n.)

5 Gosp. Pseud. Matth. xiv. An incident imagined with reference to Isa. i. 3, "The ox knoweth his owner," &c., and Hab. iii. 2, mistranslated in the LXX., "Between two animals Thou shalt be made known” (èv μéow dúo (wwv yvwołńon), and the Vet. Itala (“In medio duorum animalium innot esceris.") Cognovit bos et asinus Quod puer erat Dominus" (Pistor, De Nativ. Dom. 5).

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INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD.

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of God,1 and of many another wonder which rooted itself in the earliest traditions, there is no trace whatever in the New Testament. The inventions of man differ wholly from the dealings of God. In His designs there is no haste, no rest, no weariness, no discontinuity; all things are done by Him in the majesty of silence, and they are seen under a light that shineth quietly in the darkness, "showing all things in the slow history of their ripening." "The unfathomable depths of the Divine counsels," it has been said, "were moved; the fountains of the great deep were broken up; the healing of the nations was issuing forth: but nothing was seen on the surface of human society but this slight rippling of the water the course of human things went on as usual, while each was taken up with little projects of his own."

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How long the Virgin Mother and her holy Child stayed in this cave, or cattle-enclosure, we cannot tell, but probably it was not for long. The word rendered "manger" in Luke ii. 7,2 is of very uncertain meaning, nor can we discover more about it than that it means a place where animals were fed. It is probable that the

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2 páryn (from waτéoμal, "I eat:" Curtius, Grundzüge Griech. Etym., ii. 84). It is used for D A. V., "crib," in Prov. xiv. 4 (Targ. n, "barn;" cf. Isa. i. 3; Job xxxix. 9), and for , "stable," in 2 Chron. xxxii. 28; cf. Hab. iii. 17. In Luke xiii. 15 it is rendered "stall." actual mangers, built as they are in the shape of a kneading-trough, may be, and are, used as cradles in the East (Thomson, Land and Book, ii. 533). Even where these are wanting, there is often a projecting ledge on which the cattle can rest their nosebags. Mangers are certainly ancient (Hom. Il. x. 568; Hdt. ix. 70). On the whole I conclude that párvn means primarily "an enclosure where cattle are fed;" and secondly, "the place from which they eat," and hence is used both for a stable and a manger.

3 Vulg. "praesepe." Hence Mr. Grove (Bibl. Dict. s. v. “Bethlehem”) goes a little too far in saying that "the stable and its accompaniments are the creation of the imagination of poets and painters, with no support from the Gospel narrative."

crowd in the khan would not be permanent, and common humanity would have dictated an early removal of the mother and her child to some more appropriate restingplace. The magi, as we see from St. Matthew, visited Mary in "the house." But on all these minor incidents the Gospels do not dwell. The fullest of them is St. Luke, and the singular sweetness of his narrative, its almost idyllic grace, its sweet calm tone of noble reticence, seem clearly to indicate that he derived it, though but in fragmentary notices, from the lips of Mary herself. It is, indeed, difficult to imagine from whom else it could have come, for mothers are the natural historians of infant years; but it is interesting to find, in the actual style, that "colouring of a woman's memory and a woman's view," which we should naturally have expected in confirmation of a conjecture so obvious and so interesting.2 To one who was giving the reins to his imagination, the minutest incidents would have claimed a description; to Mary they would have seemed trivial and irrelevant. Others might wonder, but in her all wonder was lost in the one overwhelming revelation-the one absorbing consciousness. Of such things she could not lightly speak; "she kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart."3 The very depth and sacredness of that reticence is the natural and probable explanation of the fact, that some of the details of the Saviour's infancy are fully recorded by St. Luke alone.

1 Matt. ii. 11.
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2 See Lange, i. 325.

3 Luke ii. 19.

CHAPTER II.

THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE.

"He who with all heaven's heraldry whilere
Entered the world, now bleeds to give us ease.
Alas! how soon our sin

Sore doth begin

His infancy to seize!"-MILTON, The Circumcision.

FOUR events only of our Lord's infancy are narrated by the Gospels-namely, the Circumcision, the Presentation in the Temple, the Visit of the Magi, and the Flight into Egypt. Of these the first two occur only in St. Luke, the last two only in St. Matthew. Yet no single particular can be pointed out in which the two narratives are necessarily contradictory.

If, on other grounds, we have ample reason to accept the evidence of the Evangelists, as evidence given by witnesses of unimpeachable honesty, we have every right to believe that, to whatever cause the confessed fragmentariness of their narratives may be due, those narratives may fairly be regarded as supplementing each other. It is as dishonest to assume the existence of irreconcilable discrepancies, as it is to suggest the adoption of impossible harmonies. The accurate and detailed sequence of biographical narrative from the earliest years of life was a thing wholly unknown to the Jews, and alien alike from their style and temperament. Anecdotes of

C.

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