to delude them into bringing.  Like other students and recluses fed upon great thoughts, the Magi were very easily deceived.  Good, simple people, they were no match for Herod, and told him all without suspicion, and set off to look for the child, quite convinced of his good faith; while he, no doubt, breathed more freely when he had got them out of Jerusalem, and congratulated himself on having done a good stroke of business in making them his spies.  He was probably within a few months of his death.  The world was already beginning to slip from him.  But before he passed to his account, he too was brought within sight of the Christ, and summoned to yield his usurped dominion to the true King How different this old man’s reception of the tidings of the nativity from Simeon’s!  His hostility, in its cruelty, its blundering cunning and its impotence, is a type of the relations of the world-power to Christ.  ’The rulers take counsel together, ... against His anointed. ...  He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.’

V. We have next the discovery of the King.  The reappearing star becomes the guide to the humble house.  It cannot have been an ordinary star, for no such could have pointed the precise house among all the homes of Bethlehem.  The burst of joy at its reappearance vividly suggests the perplexity of the recent days, and the support given by its welcome beam to the faith which had accepted, not perhaps without some misgivings caused by the indifference of the teachers, the teaching of the prophecy.  Surely that faith would be more than ever tried by the humble poverty in which they found the King.  The great paradox of Christianity, the manifestation of divinest power in uttermost weakness, was forced upon them in its most startling form.  ’This child on His mother’s lap, with none to do Him homage, and in poverty which makes our costly gifts seem out of place,—­this is the King, whose coming set stars ablaze and drew us hither.  Is this all?’ Their Eastern religions were not unfamiliar with the idea of incarnation.  Their Eastern monarchies were splendid.  They must have felt a shock at the contrast between what they expected and what they found.  They learned the lesson which all have to learn, that Christ disappoints as well as fulfils the expectations of men, that the mightiest power is robed in lowliness, and the highest manifestation of God begins with a helpless infant on His mother’s knee.  These wise men were not repelled.  Our modern ’wise men are not all as wise as they.

VI.  Adoration and offering follow discovery.  The ‘worship’ of the Magi cannot have been adoration in the strict sense.  We attribute too much to them if we suppose them aware of Christ’s divinity.  But it was clearly more than mere reverence for an earthly King.  It hovered on the border-line, and meant an indefinite submission and homage to a partially discerned superiority, in which the presence of God was in some sort special.  The old mediaeval