Sermons for the Christian Seasons.

INNOCENTS' DAY.

THE BLESSEDNESS OF AN EARLY DEATH.

ST. MATTHEW ii. 16. Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.

It was a woeful day in the town of Bethlehem when the sword went through its streets, and many Rachels, suddenly bereft of their children, wept bitterly, and refused to be comforted, or were so stunned, so stupified through the suddenness of their affliction, that they could neither weep nor utter a cry, losing even the relief of tears.

And when Holy Scripture transports us into the midst of that lamentable scene, and we wander as it were from house to house, hearing the voice of a mother's anguish at almost every step, and seeing the little limbs of slaughtered infants streaked with blood, we seem at first sight to

have a stern and severe view of the dealings of God. At first we count it strange that He who was the Desire of all nations and the Hope of Israel, the Sun of righteousness coming to gladden the hearts of men, to make their faces shine, should bring so much woe to so many homes, so much suffering even to babes and sucklings, to little ones hanging on their mothers' breasts. It would not so much have struck us had He inflicted pain on those who had grown up in sin, or if in converting them to the truth, in bending their will to His, in subduing the stiff-necked souls of the full-grown, He had used force, had brought the fire of affliction to melt them into obedience; but in this case the pain was sent to the most innocent, to those who though born in sin had not yet stained the innocency of their childhood with any actual transgressions.

When we turn, however, from this scene to our Saviour's treatment of children at other times, and to His words concerning them; when we remember how He bade the children to be brought unto Him and took them up in His arms and blessed them, how He said of them "of such is the kingdom of heaven;" how He urged His disciples to become as children, how He set a child in the midst of the most loving,

the most pure, the most faithful of His followers as an example and a pattern, as a light to their feet, we are led to look again at the sufferings of the Innocents at Bethlehem, and to seek some other interpretation of the event than that which first suggests itself to our mind on reading the painful tale of that bloody day.

And when we look more closely at that scene of death, so far from seeing sternness and severity, the view seems to change, the mists clear away, our first impressions are succeeded by others or an opposite kind, and we discern the hand of Divine love mercifully leading the little ones by a short and speedy death, by a single act of pain, a single stroke, out of a sinful, guilty, tempting and afflicted world, into a world full of rest and joy. By one blow and in one moment the souls of the infants, being let loose, passed up by the very shortest way of death from this stage of man's warfare to the calm and blissful repose of Paradise, into Christ's presence, before the world had been able to put forth power. Surely those who have any experience of life, of what the world is as we grow up into it and have to take part in its concerns, can at once behold the compassion and mercifulness of Christ in sending forth these lambs of the flock thus early to that

safe shelter in the world above, in hurrying them from a condition where they might have been entangled in divers lusts, where they might have been led into divers sins, where they might have been tempted to cast in their lot among the children of the world, where they might have made shipwreck of their souls, and thus at last lost their crown, been for ever separated from their Lord, and lain down in sorrow, that sorrow in which there is no hope.

It was from evil to come, from trials, from temptations, from enticements to sin, from the snares and fascinations of the world, from this groaning and travailing creation, where devils come to hunt down souls, that our Lord set these children free. He let the silver cord of life be cut through by Herod's sword out of very love, and used him who had no pity to execute a work of His own compassion, and to hasten them out of the world before even the first motions of sin had begun to be known or felt, and before there were any early violations of God's law. Surely Divine love was manifested in such deaths. As regards the infants themselves, it was more merciful to shorten than to lengthen their days on earth, and to take them from trials in which they might have played a wavering or a faithless part.

When in our own day we look on infants as they lie in their mothers' arms, calm, tranquil, pure in heart, unspotted by the world, unruffled by those storms and passions which rage around, guileless, inflamed by no violent lusts, passing their days without fault before God, without actual sin, ignorant of the world and all its covetous, self-seeking, evil ways, we can at once see how merciful a thing it were in God to take them in their youth, while their Baptismal robe was as yet white as snow, whatever the pangs might be to the parent's heart. Even the parent must feel that a child taken in its childish days is taken in love, though God's love to the child makes the parent's heart to bleed.

Who can look on an infant's face without sometimes saying to himself "O what a sad, sad change may soon be here, if the infant grows up into the man; what sin, what passions, may be blackening the child's future course, deforming his soul, sweeping him onwards to destruction; and how these little soft and gentle limbs may be turned into instruments of iniquity, used in Satan's service, lifted up against his neighbour in some wrathful mood; how that tongue may utter the foolish irreverent jest, be quick in lies, or flattery, or sharp dealing; how that little heart