’Little flowers of martyrdom,
     Roses by the whirlwind shorn,’

That quotation, from Jeremiah xxxi. 16, requires a brief consideration.  The original is still less a prophecy than was the passage in Hosea.  It is a highly imaginative and grandly weird personification of the mighty mother of three of the tribes, stirring in her tomb, and lifting up the shrill lamentation of Eastern grief over her children carried away to captivity.  That hopeless wail from the grave by Bethlehem is heard as far north as Ramah, beyond Jerusalem.  Once again, says Matthew, the same grief might have been imaginatively heard from the long-silent tomb so near the scene of this pitiful tragedy.  And the second ancestral weeping was fuller of woe than the bitterness of that first lament; for this bewailed the actual slaughter of innocents, and wept the miseries that so soon gathered round the coming of the King, so long waited for.  Seeing that the prophet’s words do not describe a fact, but are a poetical personification to convey simply the idea of calamity, which might make the dead mother weep, the word ‘fulfilled’ can obviously be applied to them only in a modified and somewhat elastic sense, and is sufficiently defended if we recognise in the slaughter of these children a woe which, though small in itself, yet, when considered in reference to its inflicter, a usurping king of the Jews, and in reference to its occasion, the desire to slay the God-sent King, and in reference to its innocent victims, and in reference to its place as first of the tragic series of martyrdoms for Messiah, was heavy with a sorer burden of national disaster, when seen by eyes made wise by death, than even the captivity which seemed to falsify the promises of God and the hopes of a thousand years.

III.  The return to Nazareth, and the prophecy fulfilled therein.—­They who patiently wait for guidance, and move not till the cloud moves, are never disappointed, nor left undirected.  Joseph is a pattern of self-abnegating submission, and an example of its rewards.  The angel ever comes again to those who have once obeyed him and continue to wait.  This third appearance is described in the same words as the former.  His coming was the appearance of a familiar presence His command begins by a verbal repetition of the former summons, ’Arise and take the young child and His mother, and go,’ and then passes to a singular allusion to that command to Moses which was the first step towards the former calling of God’s son—­the nation—­out of Egypt.  ’All the men are dead which sought thy life,’ was the encouragement to Moses to go back.  ’They are dead that sought the young child’s life,’ is the encouragement to Joseph.  It sums up in one sentence the failure of the first attempt, and is like an epitaph cut on a tombstone for a man yet living,—­a prophecy of the end of all succeeding efforts to crush Christ and thwart His work.  ‘The dreaded infant’s hand’ is mightier than all mailed fists, or fingers that hold a pen.  Christ lives and grows; Herod rots and dies.