father and a mother on earth, and, that, just because of its early death, it can be to them, what otherwise they would have been to it—­the guard and helper of their Jives.  In God’s presence are the souls of children as perpetual intercessors for those whom they have left on earth; and they may well rejoice before God in that what appeared the tragedy of their death was in fact a recall from the field of battle before the testing of their life was made.  We wept as over an irreparable loss,

     While into nothingness crept back a host
     Of shadows unexplored, of sins unsinned.

The artists have imagined the souls of those who first died for Jesus attending Him on the way to Egypt as a celestial guard.  In any case we are certain that the angels who watched about Him so closely all His life were with the Holy Family as they set out upon the way of exile.  It would have been a wearisome march but that Jesus was there.  His presence lightened all the toils of the desert way.  Egypt, their place of refuge, would not have seemed to them what it seems to us, a land of wonder, of marvellous creations of human skill and intelligence, but a place of banishment from all that was dear, from the ties of home and religion.  The religion which lay wrapped in the Holy Child was to break down barriers and hindrances to the worship of God; but the time was not yet.  For them still the Holy Land, Jerusalem, the Temple, were the place of God’s manifestation, and all else the dwelling place of idols.  They must have shuddered in abhorrence at those strange forms of gods which rose about them on every hand.  We cannot ourselves fail to draw the contrast between the statues which filled the Egyptian sanctuaries and before which all Egypt, rich and poor, mighty and humble, prostrated themselves, and this Child sleeping on Mary’s breast.  The imagination of the Christian community later caught this contrast and embodied it in the legend that when Jesus crossed the border of Egypt, all the idols of the land of Egypt fell down.

We cannot follow the thought of the Blessed Mother through these strange scenes and the experiences of these days.  No doubt in the Jewish communities already flourishing in Egypt there would be welcome and the means of livelihood.  But there would be perplexing questions to one whose habit it was to keep all things which concerned her strange Child hidden in her heart, the subject of constant meditation.  Why, after the divine action which had been so constant from His conception to His birth, and in the circumstances which attended His birth, this reversal, this defeat and flight?  Why after Bethlehem, Egypt?  Why after Gabriel, Herod?

It brings us back again to the primary fact that the Incarnation is essentially a stage in a battle, and that the nature of God’s battles is such that He constantly appears to lose them.  He “goes forth as a giant to run His course”; but the eyes of man cannot see the giant—­they see only a Babe laid in a manger.  We are tricked by our notion of what is powerful.