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