that can be imagined. Thank God that we are marshalled upon such a plain, that we are fighting such a battle, although we can not see how it is going and have not been entrusted with the plan of the campaign! The orders for the day we know. These let us obey, be they to march and fight, or stand and wait; nor fail to share our scanty water with our fellow-soldiers, standing or marching or fighting beside us in the burning heat and glare. Stainless soldier on the walls Knowing this—and knows no more, Justice conquers evermore. And he who battles on her side, God, though he were ten times slain, Crowns him victor glorified Victor over death and pain Forever. THE CHILD JESUS. THE birth of any child into this world of ours is a significant event, though it may not appear so, even to those who are most intimately concerned. It is a wonder in itself, this little life, shrouded so long in densest mystery, putting in an appearance and lifting up its voice in frequent lamentations. It is a wonder in its possibilities of joy and sorrow, good and evil. I seldom, almost never, see a man or woman of our perishing and dangerous classes without some reversion of my thoughts to times when they were little, very little children, and made glad their mothers' hearts with their vague sputterings and indeterminate aspirations. A few days ago I saw the most hardened, wretched-looking man I ever saw, and, wreck that he was, imagined I could see a baby in his face of marvellous beauty, and wondered much whose fault it was, if any body's, that all that seeming promise had been so miserably belied. The birthday of any truly great man we do well to mark with honorable and festive rites. There may be crises in his life compared with which his birth seems but a trivial event. Somebody says that being married is much more portentous than being born. But marriage presupposes birth, which contains not only this great possibility but every other. And the greatest birthday in all history was that of which our Christmas is fictitiously agreed to be the anniversary. It matters very little that the exact day and year are quite unknown to us; that the year from which we reckon our chronology was not agreed upon till the sixth century, and then upon wholly insufficient data; that the true date was some years earlier-all of this matters very little. It was a piece of great good fortune that a definite day and year were fixed upon, especially a day on which men have been able to concentrate their regards of reverence and tenderness. Romanists, Protestants, and Rationalists, we are all agreed that, whenever it happened, the birth of Jesus was, of all events in the whole course of human history, the most important, fraught with the most stupendous intellectual and moral and political and social and religious consequences. In all the world that day there were probably not two more unimportant persons, to all outward seeming, than Joseph and Mary, the parents of the new-born child. Little could any one have dreamed that he was to discharge an office and to win a fame in comparison with which the office and the fame of Augustus, the ruling Cæsar, are as a farthing-candle to the sun. Only to Joseph and Mary and the other children, some of whom perhaps were born already, did it seem that something wonderful had happened, and these were infinitely wiser than the world beyond the door of their poor house. How pleasant it would be if we could penetrate the darkness in which lie concealed the infancy, the childhood, and the youth of Jesus, up to the time when he began his public ministry! How we should like to know what manner of boy he was; his build, his face; whether he had the hair of reddish gold and the great luminous eyes which Holman Hunt has given to him in his famous picture; what were his sports, and who were his companions, and how they regarded him; whether he had any proper boyhood or was overshadowed from the first by vague anticipations of his future destiny; what manner of people Joseph and Mary were, and whether they knew the gift of God, and who it was that spoke to them' in their own child; and if the other children loved him better or not quite so well for being different from them, a little moody and abstracted sometimes, when they wanted his advice about the synagogues or temples they were building with their father's chips; just what instruction he received, and by what processes he came to look upon himself as chosen for the responsibilities and joys and sorrows of the great work he finally assumed. But of all this nothing is vouchsafed to us in the New Testament, which is our only source of information. His infancy is enveloped in a beautiful mythology, where the foot nowhere finds firm soil to tread upon; and from his infancy till he is thirty years of age, he only once emerges from an obscurity otherwise impenetrable: this on the occasion of his first visit to Jerusalem, when he was twelve years old, when his father and mother sought him, sorrowing, and found him talking with the doctors in the Temple. The genius of Holman Hunt,—a genius for patience,-putting years of antiquarian and local study into the making of a single picture, has enabled us to conceive of that scene with an exactness seldom attainable in our pictorial conceptions of the past. But with this exception, we get no direct glimpse into the childhood or the youth of Jesus; beyond this all is inferential. Even that this is a direct glimpse we can never feel quite sure; but it has no intrinsic improbability, as have the beautiful stories of his birth and infancy. Are we then left entirely in the dark in regard to the child Jesus and those things which contributed to his early education? No, we are not; and for two reasons. First, in the accounts of his active ministry there are certain things implied about his childhood and his youth. Nor must it be forgotten that in such writings as the gospels, what is implied is of more value than what is directly stated; what we read between the lines is of more value than what we read in them What is thus implied in the accounts of Jesus' later life is, however, of very limited amount. It is, broadly stated, that he was born in Nazareth (there not being a single allusion to the Bethlehemite nativity, beyond its mention in the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke, but plentiful allusions of a contrary import)—that he was one of a considerable family of children, mainly, if not all, younger than himself-a pleasant fact, to which Roman Catholic and even Protestant piety has been rather wilfully and very pruriently blind ; |