272 BOYS OF THE BIBLE.

aspect. He had no means of identifying the royal infant of
the seed of David, and least of. all would he have been
likely to seek for him in the cavern stable of the village
Khan. But he knew that the child whom the visit of the
Magi had taught him to regard as a future rival of himself
or of his house, was yet an infant at the breast; he issued
his fell mandate to slay all the male children of Bethlehem
and its neighborhood ‘from two years old and under.” Of
the method by which the decree was carried out we know
nothing. The children may have been slain secretly, gradu-
ally, and by various forms of murder; or, as has been
generally supposed, there may have been one single. hour of
dreadful butchery. The decrees of tyrants like Herod are
usually involved in a deadly obscurity. They reduce the
world into a torpor in which it is hardly safe to speak
above a whisper. But the wild wail of anguish which rose
from the mothers thus cruelly robbed of their infant children
could not be hushed; and they who heard it might well
imagine that Rachel, the great ancestress of their race,
whose tomb stands by the roadside about a mile from Beth-
lehem, once more—as in the pathetic image of the prophet—
mingled her voice with the mourning and lamentation of
those who wept so inconsolably for their. murdered little
ones.”

Doubts have been cast by certain writers on the truth-
fulness of the awful story; and, indeed, we could well wish
this dreadful record were not true. To us, in these later,
happier years of the world’s history, it seems almost impos-
sible to believe that such inhuman cruelties could have been
performed. But this shameful deed is just the kind of thing
Herod was sure to do, if these hapless, helpless innocents
stood in the way of his pride or power. Herod’s whole