Of the Massacre of the Innocents.

When people speak of the massacre of the innocents, they do not refer to the Sicilian Vespers, nor to the matins of Paris, known under the name of St. Bartholomew; nor to the inhabitants of the new world, who were murdered because they were not Christians, nor to the auto-da-fés of Spain and Portugal, etc. They usually refer to the young children who were killed within the precincts of Bethlehem, by order of Herod the Great, and who were afterwards carried to Cologne, where they are still to be found.

Their number was maintained by the whole Greek Church to be fourteen thousand.

The difficulties raised by critics upon this point of history have been all solved by shrewd and learned commentators.

Objections have been started in relation to the star which conducted the Magi from the recesses of the East to Jerusalem. It has been said that the journey, being a long one, the star must have appeared for a long time above the horizon; and yet that no historian besides St. Matthew ever took notice of this extraordinary star; that if it had shone so long in the heavens, Herod and his whole court, and all Jerusalem, must have seen it as well as these three Magi, or kings; that Herod consequently could not, without absurdity, have inquired diligently, as Matthew expresses it, of these kings, at what time they had seen the star; that, if these three kings had made presents of gold and myrrh and incense to the new-born infant, his parents must have been very rich; that Herod could certainly never believe that this infant, born in a stable at Bethlehem, would be king of the Jews, as the kingdom of Jud?a belonged to the Romans, and was a gift from C?sar; that if three kings of the Indies were, at the present day, to come to France under the guidance of a star, and stop at the house of a woman of Vaugirard, no one could ever make the reigning monarch believe that the child of that poor woman would become king of France.

A satisfactory answer has been given to these difficulties, which may be considered preliminary ones, attending the subject of the massacre of the innocents; and it has been shown that what is impossible with man is not impossible with God.

With respect to the slaughter of the little children, whether the number was fourteen thousand, or greater, or less, it has been shown that this horrible and unprecedented cruelty was not absolutely incompatible with the character of Herod; that, after being established as king of Jud?a by Augustus, he could not indeed fear anything from the child of obscure and poor parents, residing in a petty village; but that laboring at that time under the disorder of which he at length died, his blood might have become so corrupt that he might in consequence have lost both reason and humanity; that, in short, all these incomprehensible events, which prepared the way for mysteries still more incomprehensible, were directed by an inscrutable Providence.

It is objected that the historian Josephus, who was nearly contemporary, and who has related all the cruelties of Herod, has made no more mention of the massacre of the young children than of the ............