360. The Babe’s Escape.

The Babe’92s Escape.

Mat_2:13 : ’93Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.’94

The cradle of the infant Jesus had no rockers, for it was not to be soothed by oscillating motion, as are the cradles of other princes. It had no canopy, for it was not to be covered by anything so exquisite. It had no embroidered pillow, for the young head was not to have such luxurious comfort. Though a meteor’97ordinarily the most erratic and seemingly ungovernable of all sky appearances’97had been sent to designate the place where that cradle stood, and a choir had been sent from the heavenly temple to serenade its illustrious occupant with an anthem, yet that cradle was the target for all earthly and diabolical hostilities. Indeed, I give you as my opinion that it was the narrowest and most wonderful escape of the ages that the Child was not slain before he had taken his first step or spoken his first word. Herod could not afford to have him born. The C’e6sars could not afford to have him born. The great oppressions and abominations of the world could not afford to have him born. Was there ever planned a more systematized or appalling bombardment in all the world than the bombardment of that cradle?

The Herod who led the attack was treachery, malignity and sensuality impersonated. As a sort of pastime he slew Hycranus, the grandfather of his wife. Then he slew Mariamne, his wife. Then he butchered her two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus. Then he slew Antipater, his oldest son. Then he ordered burned alive forty people who had pulled down the eagle of his authority. He ordered the nobles who had attended upon his dying bed to be slain, so that there might be universal mourning after his decease. From that same death-bed he ordered the slaughter of all the children in Bethlehem under two years of age, feeling sure that if he massacred the entire infantile population that would include the destruction of the Child whose birthplace astronomy had pointed out with its finger of light. What were the slaughtered babes to him, or the many frenzied and bereft mothers? If he had been well enough to leave his bed, he would have enjoyed seeing the mothers wildly struggling to keep their babes, and holding them so tightly that they could not be separated until the sword took both lives at one stroke, and others, mother and child, hurled from roofs of houses into the street, until that village of horseshoe shape on the hillside became one great butcher shop. To have such a man, with associates just as cruel, and an army at his command, attempting the life of the infant Jesus, does there seem any chance for his escape? Then that flight southward for so many miles, across deserts and amid bandits and wild beasts (my friend, the late missionary and scientist, Dr. Lansing, who took the same journey, said it was enough to kill the Madonna and the Child), and poor residence in Cairo, Egypt. You know how difficult it is to take an ordinary child successfully through the disorders that are sure to assail it even in comfortable homes and with all delicate ministries, and then think of the exposure of that famous Babe in villages and lands where all sanitary laws were set at defiance, his first hours on earth spent in a room without any doors, and oft-times swept by chilled night winds; then afterward riding many days under hot tropical sun, and part of many nights, lest the avenger overtake the fugitive before he could be hidden in another land!

The Sanhedrin also were affronted at the report of this mysterious arrival of a child that might upset all conventionalities and threaten the throne of the nation. ’93Shut the door and bolt it and double-bar it against him,’94 cried all political and ecclesiastical power. Christ on a retreat when only a few days of age, with all the privations and hardships and sufferings of retreat! When the glad news came that Herod was dead, and the Madonna was packing up and taking her Child home, bad news also came, that Archelaus, the son, had taken the throne’97another crowned infamy. What chance for the Babe’92s life? Will not some short grave hold the wondrous Infant?’94

’93Put him to death!’94 was the order all up and down Palestine, and all up and down the desert between Bethlehem and Cairo. The cry was, ’93Here comes an iconoclast of all established order! Here comes an aspirant for the crown of Augustus! If found on the streets of Bethlehem, dash him to death on the pavement! If found on a hill, hurl him down the rocks! Away with him!’94 But the Babe got home in safety, and passed up from infancy to youth, and from youth to manhood, and from carpenter-shop to Messiahship, and from Messiahship to Enthronement, until the mightiest name on earth is Jesus, and there is no mightier name in heaven.

What I want to call your attention to is your narrow escape and mine, and the world’92s narrow escape. Suppose that attempt on the young Child’92s life had been successful! Suppose that delegation of wise men, who were to report to Herod immediately after they discovered the hard bed in Bethlehem caravansary, had obeyed orders and reported! Suppose the beast carrying the Madonna and the Child in the flight had stumbled and flung to death its riders! Suppose Archelaus had got his hands on the Babe that his father had failed to find! Suppose that among the children dashed from the Bethlehem house-tops, or separated by sword of the enraged constabulary, Jesus had perished!

Then, to begin on the outermost rim of my subject, Christmas festivities would never have been observed, Christmas carols never sung, Christmas gifts never bestowed, Christmas games never played, Christmas bells never rung. What an awful subtraction from the world’92s brightness would have been the making of December twenty-fifth like other days of the year! Glorious day! After brightening England and Holland and Germany for centuries, it stepped across the sea and pronounced its benediction on our shores. Why, we never get over the Christmases of our childhood! Father and mother joined in them. They forgot their rheumastisms and shortness of breath, and for a while threw off the sorrows of a lifetime, while they struggled with us as to who should first in the morning shout the ’93Merry Christmas!’94 Then, there were all the innocent mysteries as to who brought the presents, and the wonderment as to how sleighs drawn by reindeer could come down the perpendicular, and afterward the disappointment as some older brother or sister, with all the pride of discovery, tried to persuade us that the chimney had not been the channel of generous descent. Oh, what times they were, the Christmases of our boyhood and girlhood days! We still feel in our pulses some of the exuberance which we then unwittingly stored up for future times, when the eye might lose some of its luster, and the foot some of its spring, and the heart some of its rebound. How holly and rosemary and ivy and mistletoe looked, interwoven! The Puritans may not have liked the day, and John Calvin may have pronounced it superstitious and feared it would bring into religious observance the Saturnalia of the heathen; the decorations of ivy inappropriate, because ivy had been dedicated to Bacchus, and mistletoe inappropriate, because mistletoe had been associated with Druidical rites; but we testify that Christmas never did us any harm, and the only objection we ever expressed was that it was so long a time from Christmas to Christmas. Ecclesiastical controversy as to whether it ought to be celebrated on the sixth of January or twenty-ninth of March or twenty-ninth of September or twenty-fifth of December did not bother us then any more than it bothers us now. It always came at the right time, although a little late, and now we realize that Christmas comes opportunely, just after the shortest day of the year, December twenty-first, and at the time when days are lengthening and the sun is recommencing its upward course, telling us that spring and summer are coming. Oh, what a forest of Christmas trees’97trees bearing twelve manner of fruits’97now standing throughout the households of Christendom! Oh, what hosannas are ascending on this day, the Christmas of a Saviour’92s birth, this year blending with the Sabbath of a Saviour’92s resurrection! Do you not feel the thrill, the glow, the enlargement, the triumph of this day, and will not your charities go forth until you sympathize with the quaint old Christmas carol’97so old I do not know who wrote it’97its title, ’93Scatter Your Crumbs:’94

Midst the freezing sleet and snow,

The timid robin comes;

In pity, drive him not away,

But scatter out your crumbs.

And leave your door upon the latch

For whosoever comes;

The poorer they, more welcome give,

And scatter out your crumbs.

All have to spare, none are too poor

When want with winter comes,

And life is never all your own;

Then scatter out the crumbs.

Soon winter falls upon your life,

The day of reckoning comes;

Against your sins, by high decree,

Are weighed those scattered crumbs.

Can the angel which St. John saw, with measuring-rod measuring heaven, or can any seraphic intelligence calculate the magnificent effect which eighteen hundred and ninety-eight Christmas mornings, and eighteen hundred and ninety-eight Christmas noons, and eighteen hundred and ninety-eight Christmas nights have had on our poor old planet? Let us thank God that we live to see this Christmas, the bells of which ring out so clear, so inspiring, so jubilant’97bells of family reunion, bells of church jubilee, bells of national victory! But had either Melchior or Balthazar or Caspar, the three wise men of the East, who had put down the sacks of aromatic frankincense or bags of chinking gold by the bare feet of the infant Lord, reported to Herod’92s palace the place where they found the Child, the swift horses of executioners would have carried death to that Babe cradled in Mary’92s arm, and the Bethlehem Star would have been a star of tragedy; and, instead of a Song of Nativity, which the nations are now chanting, this day would be chiefly memorable for the shriek of bereft motherhood.

Still further remarking upon the narrow escape Which you and I, and all the world had in that Babe’92s escape, let me say that had that Herodic plot been successful, the one instance of absolutely perfect character would never have been unfolded. The world had exulted in the lives of many splendid men before Christ came. It had admired its Plato among philosophers, its Mithridates among heroes, its Herodotus among historians, its Phidias among sculptors, its Homer among poets, its ‘c6sop among fabulists, its ‘c6schylus among dramatists, its Demosthenes among orators, its ‘c6sculapius among physicians; yet among the contemporaries of those men there were two opinions, as now there are two opinions, concerning every remarkable man. There were plenty in those days who said of them, ’93He cannot speak,’94 or ’93He cannot sing,’94 or ’93He cannot philosophize,’94 or ’93His military achievement was a mere accident,’94 or ’93His chisel, his pen, his medical prescription never deserved the applause given.’94 But concerning this full-grown Christ, whose life was launched on that first Christmas, the moan of camels, and the bleat of sheep, and the low of cattle mingling with the Babe’92s first cry, while clouds that night were resonant with music, and star pointing down whispered to star, ’93Look, there he is!’94 Although the detectives of Herod and Pilate and Sanhedrin had watched him by day and watched him by night, year after year, that Christ was reported innocent. It was found out that when he talked to the vagrant woman in the temple, it was to tell her to ’93Go and sin no more,’94 and that if he spoke with the penitent thief, it was to promise him Paradise within twenty-four hours; and that as he moved about he dropped ease of pain upon the invalid’92s pillow, or light upon the eye that lacked optic nerve, or put bread into the hands of the hungry, or took from the Oriental hearse the dead young man and vitalized him, and said to the widowed mother, ’93Here he is, alive and well!’94 and she cried, ’93My boy! my boy!’94 and he responded, ’93Mother! mother!’94 And the sea, tossing too roughly some of his friends, by a word easier than a nurse’92s word to a petulant child, he made it keep still. The very judge who for other reasons allowed him to be put to death declared, ’93I find no fault in him!’94 Was there ever a life so thoroughly ransacked and hypercriticised that turned out to be so perfect a life? Now, can you imagine what would have been the calamity to earth and heaven; what a bereavement to all history; what swindling, not only of the human race, but of cherubim and seraphim and archangel, if because of infernal incursion upon the bed of that Bethlehem Babe, this life of divine and glorious manhood had never been lived? The Christic parables would never have been uttered; the Sermon on the Mount, all a-drip with benedictions, never preached; the Golden Rule, in picture-frame of everlasting love, would never have been hung up for the universe to gaze upon and admire.

Can you imagine what a loss of the world’92s literature would be the removal of all Christ ever did and said? It would tear down the most important shelves of yonder Congressional Library and of the Vatican Library and of British Museum, and the libraries of Berlin and Bonn and Vienna and Madrid and St. Petersburg. And St. Paul’92s life would have been an impossibility, and his Epistles would never have been written, and St. John, from the basaltic caverns of Patmos, would never have heard the Seven Trumpets or seen the heavenly walls with twelve layers of illumined crystallization. Oh, wise men of the East! I am so glad you did not report to the imperial scoundrel at Jerusalem where the Babe was, for the hounds would have soon torn to pieces the Lamb, and I am so glad that not only did you bring the frankincense and the myrrh to the room in that caravansary, but that you brought the gold which paid his traveling expenses and those of Joseph and Mary in that long and dangerous flight to Cairo in Egypt, and paid their lodging and board there, and paid their way back again. Well enough to bring to the barn of the Saviour’92s nativity the flowers, for they aromatized the dreadful atmosphere of the stables, but the gold was just then the most important offering. So now the Lord accepts your prayers, for they are the perfume of heaven; but he asks also for the gold which will pay the expense of taking Christ to all nations.

Still further remarking upon the narrow escape which you and I and the world had in the diversion of the persecutors from the place of nativity, let me say that had that Herodic raid upon the swaddling clothes been successful, the world would never have known the value of a righteous peace. Much has been made of the fact that the world was at peace when Christ came. Yes! But what kind of a peace was it? It was a peace worse than war. It was the peace of a graveyard. The Roman eagles had plucked out the world’92s eyesight and plunged their -beaks through the heart of dead nations. It was a peace like that spoken of by a dying Indian chieftain when a Christian home missionary said to him, ’93You have been a warrior, and I suppose have been in many feuds; but you must be at peace with all your enemies in order to die aright.’94 The dying chieftain replied, ’93That’92s easy enough. I am at peace with all my enemies, for I have killed all of them.’94 ’93That was the style of peace on earth when Christ came; but the spirit of arbitration, which is to garland the tomb of this century and coronet the brow of the coming century, is the result of the midnight anthem above Bethlehem, two bars to that music, the first of divine ascription, and the second of earthly pacification. ’93Glory to God and peace to men.’94 In his manhood Christ pronounced the same doctrine, ’93Blessed are the merciful.’94 Before the Bethlehem star flashed its significance, the theory was, ’93Blessed is wholesale cut-throatery. Blessed are those who can kill the most antagonists. Blessed are those who can most skilfully wield the battle-ax. Blessed are those who can stab the deepest with spear, or roll a chariot-wheel over the most wounded, or put his charger’92s hoof on the most dead.’94 The entirely new theory of our Christ was blessing for cursing, prayer for those who despitefully use you, foundries to turn spears into pruning-hooks, red-hot furnaces to melt swords into moulds shaped like plowshares. If gigantic acerbities and world-wide tigerisms had, without any Gospel opposition, gone on until now and been augmented by eighteen hundred and ninety-eight years of ferocity, by this time what would this world have been turned into? You need not remind me of the awful wars since the opening of the year one of our Christian era; for if the earth has been again and again lacerated into an Aceldama through improved arsenals of death, and more rapidity of fire through Prussian breech-loader, which in 1866 startled the nations with unprecedented havoc, eclipsed by contrivances that can sweep vaster numbers to death by one volley; and telegraphy adding to gunnery new facilities for slaughter by instantly ordering armies to where they can do the most wholesale murder’97I say if all this woe has been wrought, how much worse would it have been if the Christly revelation had not been let down from heaven on five-runged ladder of musical staff, and there had been no preaching of good-will all up and down Christendom for nineteen centuries! The Bethlehem manger has given the most potent suggestion of peace the world has ever received. The cavalry horses cannot eat out of that manger.

I take another step forward in showing the narrow escape you and I had and the world had in the concealment of Christ’92s birthplace from the Herodic detectives, and the clubs with which they would have dashed the Babe’92s life out, when I say that without the life that began that night in Bethlehem, the world would have had no illumined deathbeds. Before the time of Christ, good people closed their earthly lives in peace, while depending upon the Christ to come; and there were antediluvian saints, and Assyrian saints and Egyptian saints and Grecian saints and Jerusalem saints long before the clouds above Bethlehem became a balcony filled with the best singers of a world where they all sing; but I cannot read that there was anything more than a quieting guess that came to those before-Christ deathbeds. Job said something bordering on the confident, but it was mixed up with a story of ’93skin-worms’94 that would destroy his body. Abraham and Jacob had a little light on the dying pillow, but compared with the after-Christ deathbeds, it was like the dim tallow candle of old beside the modern cluster of lights electric. I know Elijah went up in memorable manner, but it was a terrible way to go’97a whirlwind of fire that must have been splendid to look at by those who stood on the banks of the Jordan, but it was a mode of ascent that required more nerve than you and I ever had, to be a placid occupant of a chariot drawn by such a wild team. The triumphant deathbeds, as far as I know, were the after-Christ deathbeds. What a procession of hosannas have marched through the dying room of the saints of the last nineteen centuries! What cavalcade of mounted hallelujahs has galloped through the dying visions of the last nineteen centuries! Peaceful deathbeds in the years B. C.! Triumphant deathbeds, for the most part, reserved for the years A. D.! Behold the deathbeds of the Wesleys, of the Doddridges, of the Leigh Richmonds, of the Edward Paysons; of Vara, the converted heathen chieftain, crying in his last moments, ’93The canoe is in the sea. The sails are spread. She is ready for the gale. I have a good Pilot to guide me. My outside man and my inside man differ. Let the one rot till the trumpet shall sound, but let my soul wing her way to the throne of Jesus.’94 Of dying John Fletcher, who entered his pulpit to preach, though his doctors forbade him, and then descended to the communion table, saying, ’93I am going to throw myself under the wings of the cherubim before the mercy-seat,’94 thousands of people a few days after following him to the grave, saying:

With heavenly weapons he has fought

The battles of the Lord,

Finished his course and kept the faith,

And gained the great reward.

Of pastor Emille Cook, the great French evangelist, who sat in my church in Brooklyn one Sunday morning, and in a few days shipwrecked and dying, after his wife said to him, ’93God will help you, my dear; he will give you peace,’94 replying, ’93But I have it’97peace! I have it!’94 Of Prince Albert, quoting with his last breath, ’93Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee!’94 Of the dying soldier who had been shot through the mouth and could not talk, and when the chaplain approached him, motioned for pencil and paper and wrote, ’93I am a Christian, prepared to die. Rally round the flag! Rally round the flag!’94 Of John Brown, of Haddington, who said, ’93I desire to depart and be with Christ, and though I have lived sixty years very comfortably in this world, I would turn my back upon you all to be with Christ. There is no one like Christ’97no one like Christ. I have been looking at him these many year, and never yet could find any fault in him but was of my own making, though he has seen ten thousand faults in me. Oh, what must he be in himself, when it is he that sweetens heaven, sweetens Scripture, sweetens ordinances, sweetens earth, sweetens trial.’94 Of John Janeway, saying in his last moments, ’93I have done with prayer and all other ordinances. Before a few hours are over I shall be in eternity, singing the song of Moses and the Lamb. I shall presently stand on Mount Zion with an innumerable company of angels and with spirits of just men made perfect, and with Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant. Hallelujah!’94 Some one ought to preach a course of sermons on triumphant Christian deathbeds, and then let some one preach a sermon on triumphant infidel deathbeds’97that is, if he can hear or read of one of this latter kind. I never heard of one. Do tell us of one. There never was one. And had the Babe of Bethlehem died the same week in which he was born, there never would have been a triumphant Christian death-bed. It is the wonderful story of Christ, now rapidly filling the earth, that makes triumphant Christian deathbeds. The Bethlehem Star had to give way before the rising Sun which was to become the noonday Sun of Righteousness.

Are you ready now for a thought that overtowers all other thoughts in importance and grandeur? Pray that you may be ready. It as far exceeds anything I have said as all the gold mines of California, developed and undeveloped, exceed the thimbleful of gold dust which in 1848 a California miner brought from a mill-race and put upon the desk of a surprised capitalist. In remarking upon the narrow escape which you and I and the world made, let me say that had the Herodic raid on that room of the Bethlehem khan been a successful raid, or had some cold taken by the child in that flight toward Cairo been fatal, heaven would have been to us an eternal impossibility. With our fallen nature unchanged, unregenerated, unreconstructed through Jesus Christ, the human race would be no more fit for heaven than a noisome weed is fit for a queen’92s garland, no more than a shattered base viol is fit to sound in a Dusseldorf musical jubilee. If at one time Garibaldi seemed to hold in his right hand the freedom of Italy, and Washington seemed at one time to hold in his right hand American independence, and Martin Luther seemed to hold in his right hand the emancipation of the Church of God for all nations; so in grander and better sense the infant born in that Bethlehem stall held in one hand the ransom of earth, and in the other the rapture of heaven. He started that night for three places which he must reach or we never could reach heaven: Gethsemane and Calvary and Olivet’97the first for agonizing prayer, the second for excruciating suffering, the third for glorious ascension, as the law of gravitation relaxed for once to let him up out of his exile. Had his life been only one day, or one year of duration, instead of thirty-three years, had he died in Bethlehem or in Cairo or in the desert between, not a church would ever have been built, not a hospital ever opened, not a nation ever freed, not a civilization ever inaugurated, not a soul saved. Oh, what a crisis that was in the world’92s history! What a crisis in the eternities! I think that the angels who composed the choir for the Christmas cantata above Bethlehem were not the only angels around that night. I think there were some who, instead of holding librettos of celestial music, stood all up and down the steeps of heaven with drawn swords, keen and two-edged. That cradle must be defended. That flight into Egypt must be protected by winged cohort. That humble stopping-place in Cairo must be watched by celestial bands descending amid the Egyptian pyramids and the sphinx, which had already stood there for ages celebrating kings, none of whom ever had such glory as will be won by that Prince sleeping in his mother’92s arms under their long shadows. Hear it, all ye people, in that Babe’92s survival our heaven was involved. And shall we not add to our usual Christmas congratulation at a Saviour’92s birth the joy at the Babe’92s rescue?

Now let the Christmas table be spread. Let it be an extension table made up of the tables of your households, and added to them the tables of celestial festivity, all together making a table long enough to reach across a hemisphere, yea long enough to reach from earth to heaven. Send out the invitations to all the guests whom we would like to have come and dine. Come, all the ransomed of earth and all the crowned of heaven. As at ancient banquets the king who was to preside came in after all the guests had taken their places at the table, so perhaps it may be now. Let the old folks who sat at each end of your Christmas table ten or twenty or forty years ago be seated, their aches and pains all gone; behold, they sit down in the exhilaration of everlasting youth! Come, brothers and sisters who used to retire with us early on Christmas eve so that the mysteries of bestowed gifts might be kept secret, and who rose with us early on Christmas morn to see what was to be revealed. Come, all the old neighbors of our boyhood and girlhood days who used to happen in toward the close of this day to wish us a merry time. Come, all the ministers of Christ who have in pulpits for many a year been telling the story of the star that pointed to the world’92s first Christmas gift, and at the same time wakened Herod’92s apprehensions. Come and sit down, ye heralds of ’93the glad tidings,’94 whether you were sprinkled or plunged, whether your thanks today be offered in liturgy of ages or prayers spontaneous, whether you be gowned in canonicals or wearing plain coat of backwoods meeting-house. Come in! Room at this Christmas table for all those who have bowed at the manger in whatever world you now live:

Part of the host have crossed the flood,

And part are crossing now.

Yea! come, and sit at this Christmas table, all heaven: archangel at that end of the table, and all the angels under him adjoining. Come down! Come in! and take your places at this Christmas banquet. The table is spread, and the King who will preside is about to enter. He comes! him of Bethlehem, him of Calvary, him of Olivet, him of the throne! Rise and greet him. Fill all your chalices with the wine pressed from the heavenly Eshcol, and drink at this Christmas banquet to the memory of the Babe’92s rescue from Herodic pursuit, and the memory of those astronomers of the East who defeated the malice, and sarcasm, and irony and infernal stratagem of the monster’92s manifesto: ’93Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.’94 ’93Given at the palace. Herod the Great.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage