look on him, and her obedient ears hear his voice.  But Joseph, who stood on a lower spiritual level, needed the lower form of revelation by dream, which betokens less susceptibility in the recipient and less importance in the communication.  It is the only form appropriate to his power of receiving, and four times it is mentioned as granted to him.  The warning to the wise men was also conveyed in a dream.  We can scarcely help recalling the similar prominence of dreams in the history of the earlier Joseph, whose life was moulded in order to bring Israel into Egypt.

The angel speaks of ‘the young child and His mother,’ reversing the order of nature, as if he bowed before the infant, ’Lord of men as well as angels,’ and would deepen the lesson which so many signs gathering round the cradle were teaching the silent Joseph,—­that Mary and he were but humble ministers of the child’s.  The partial instruction given, and the darkness left lying over the future, are in accordance with the methods of God’s leading, which always gives light enough for the next duty, and never for the one after that.  The prompt and precise obedience of Joseph to the heavenly vision is emphatically expressed by the verbal repetition of the command in the account of its fulfilment.  There was no hesitation, no reluctance, no delay.  On the very night, as it appears, of the dream, he rose up; the simple preparations were quickly made; the wise men’s gifts would help to sustain their modest wants, and before the day broke they were on their road.  How strangely blended in our Lord’s life, from the very dawning, are dignity and lowliness, glory and reproach!  How soon His brows are crowned with thorns!  The adoration of the Magi witnesses to Him as the King of Israel and the hope of the world.  The flight of which that adoration was the direct cause witnesses no less clearly to Him as despised and rejected, tasting sorrow in His earliest food, and not having where to lay His head.

But the most important part of the story is the connection which Matthew discerns between it and Hosea’s words.  In their original place they are not a prophecy at all, but simply a part of a tender historical resume of God’s dealings with Israel, by which the prophet would touch his contemporaries’ hearts into penitence and trust.  How, then, is the evangelist justified in regarding them as prophetic, and in looking on Christ’s flight as their fulfilment?  The answer is to be found in that analogy between the national and the personal Israel which runs through all the Old Testament, and reaches its greatest clearness in the second part of Isaiah’s prophecies.  Jesus Christ was what Israel was destined and failed to be, the true Servant of God, His Anointed, His Son, the medium of conveying His name to the world.  The ideal of the nation was realised in Him.  His brief stay in Egypt served the very same purpose in His life which their four hundred years there did in theirs,—­it sheltered Him from enemies,