He came into the peculiar climate of Jerusalem.  Jerusalem is Judea.  Out of the Babylonian remnant of Israel had come great men, true leaders, with great zeal for the city, and the temple, and the temple service, and for the law.  They made the mould in which this later Jerusalem was cast.  But that mould retaining its old form, had now become filled with the baser metals.  The high ideals of the new makers of the city had shrunk into mere ideas.  The small, strongly entrenched ruling circle were tenacious sticklers for traditions as interpreted by themselves.  That fine old word conservative (with an underneath meaning of “what we prefer”) was one of their sweetest morsels.  Underneath their great pride as Moses’ successors, the favored custodians of the nation’s most sacred treasures, was a passionate love for gold.  The temple service was secretly organized on the profit-sharing plan, with the larger share, as usual, for the organizers.

That hardest thing in the whole range of human action to overcome, either by God or man or the devil—­prejudice—­they had, in the Simon-pure form, superlatively refined.  The original treasure of God’s Word was about as much overlaid and hidden away by writings about it as—­it has been in some other times.  Of course they were looking for a Messiah, the one hope of their sacredly guarded literature.  But He must be the sort that they wanted, and—­could use.

Herod the King was a man of great ability, great ambition, great passion, and great absence of anything akin to conscience.  But the virtual ruler was the high priest.  His office was bargained for, bought and sold for the money and power it controlled in the way all too familiar to corrupt political life in all times, and not wholly unknown in our own.  The old spiritual ideals of Moses, and Samuel, preached amid degeneracy by Elijah and Isaiah, were buried away clear out of sight by mere formalism, though still burning warm and tender in the hearts of a few.  This was the atmosphere of the old national capital into which Jesus came.

The Bethlehem Fog.

Then it was that Jesus came.  Strange to say, there is a shadow over His coming from the beginning.  A gray chilling shadow of the sort of gray that a stormy sky sometimes shows, gray tingeing into slaty black.  Yet it was the coming that made the shadow.  It takes light, and some thick thing like a block, and some distance for perspective, to make a shadow.  The nearer the light to the block thing the blacker the shadow.  Here the light came close to some thick blocks; of stupid thickness; human blocks grown more toughly thick by the persistent resisting of any such transparent thing as light.

This was a foggy shadow.  A fog is always made by influences from below.  A lowering temperature chills the air, and brings down its moisture in the shape of a gray subtle pervasive mist, that blurs the outlook, and often gathers and holds black smoke, and mean poisonous odors and gases from bog and swamp.  Such a fog endangers both health and life.  This was just such a shadowing fog.  There was a decided drop in the temperature, a sudden chill, a fog formed that sucked up the poison of the marshes, and threatened to stifle the baby breath of the new-born King.