“My knowledge is so weak, oh, blissful queen, To tell abroad thy mighty worthiness,
That I the weight of it may not sustain;
But as a child of twelve months’ old or less
That laboreth his language to express,
Even so fare I and therefore pray,
Guide thou my song which I of thee may say.”
—Wordsworth.
 
“If I could only carry to Bethany what I feel now!” ejaculated the young chaplain, as he hurried along from the knights’ celebration of Pentecost, homeward, at the time that the Moslems were summoned to evening prayers by the minaret calls.
 
After his greeting, on arriving at his abode, his first words were: “I’ve seen the crowns of fire, and now comprehend the meaning of Pentecost, where men gathered from varied climes, heard each the spirit’s message in his own tongue! The Spirit is the interpreter!”
 
“By what aid came this revelation?”
 
“God and the Hospitaler.”
 
“We have the first here; let us call the other, that the temple on the hill be made to feel the glow. The time is opportune, for each day witnesses new triumphs of our cause.”
 
[539]
 
When the knight arrived a feast was in progress. His air awed those to whom he was a stranger, and there were not a few who thought within themselves,
 
“Is he a prophet?”
 
Abruptly, as usual, he began:
 
“Friends: I would that all hearts here were moved by justice to enthrone the Queen whose praise your frank youths have been sincerely singing. I am here to-day to proclaim her rights, and in so doing I shall appeal to that sure word which survives when all else fails. She was of David’s royal line; the noblest one of all the earth. To the proof? The Christian Scriptures, from the hands of Matthew and Luke, present her ancestral descent. These apostles wrote as God directed, and, after all, only reaffirmed that already set forth in the most carefully, religiously guarded records of all antiquity, the Jewish genealogical tables.
 
“You know that the ancient Jews held those tables in sacred regard, for on their integrity depended the proof of the things to them most dear, as they believed. By them every Jew could trace his Abrahamic descent, and to Abraham’s seed were all the great promises of the covenant. By those tables they proved their title to the land of promise, Canaan. Every Jew, believing himself one of God’s chosen people, and that his advancement and the advancement of his posterity in the Divine favor, depended on the purity of the blood of both, felt that he needed the guidance of those tables to preserve him from any admixture with alien or Gentile blood. The Aaronic priesthood was hereditary and the priesthood was initial in the religious system of the Hebrews. Its legitimacy was preserved chiefly by these hereditary charters.[540] Then all true Israelites looked for the coming of a Savior, Priest and King to bring to the chosen transcendent glory, and to win an universal dominion, marked by love, joy and peace. Every Jew knew that Great One was to spring from the house of David, and all within that Judaic line hoping that he or his children might be near akin to the One to come, carefully, constantly, proudly guarded and studied these records of descent. Birth was the foundation upon which all Jewish institutions were founded. ‘So all Israel was reckoned by genealogies.’ They lived in a reign of blood, and in blood to be Jewishly thoroughbred was, they thought, to be most highly favored. They had not yet discerned the law of the new dispensation, which declares all men akin; a dispensation seeking to build up a superior humanity by first of all transforming and exalting the inner life. By the revered records of these Jewish patriarchs, both holy and love-ladened, place the writings of Matthew and Luke, and with concurrent testimony, unimpeachable as well as conclusive, the legitimacy of Jesus the son of Mary is proven! He was beyond a cavil of David’s kingly line. There were Christ-haters who contested at every point His claim of Messiahship. They forged lies freely; they hurled after Him slanders innumerable; they insinuated that He was born in fornication; they affected to flee from Him as one having a devil; they denounced Him to Jewish as well as Roman authorities as a liar, a seducer of men and a traitor. In a word, they howled Him down in every way they could, unabashed by the splendor of His baptismal indorsement, unsilenced by the awful warnings of His cross. But in their desperation they never dared to challenge[541] the records which proved Him ‘the son of David.’ Now had His claims rested upon His relations to His earthly father, Joseph, they would have been disproven. All Jewry would have quickly, fiercely proclaimed Him a pretender and not in the family of promise. The Christ was heir of David’s name and fame because His mother was, and so in exalting Him you crown the saintly woman who bore Him! He was the adopted son of Joseph, type of all His followers, adopted sons of a Royal Father. He was legitimate through his mother, type of all his followers, brought into the royal family of God by the power of a mystic new birth.
 
“But there is another line running backward, preserved through the centuries to connect the first Adam with this last one. This line runs from Christ through his mother to Eden. Behold the august truth suspended by that chain of names! Names; only names of the dead! names of the forgotten! Jesus by Mary is linked to the chain! It’s an old, old chain, but yet it has gems in its links. Each named is the child of another living before, and the history of each is recorded in two words, ‘begat,’ ‘died.’ A chain of dust! One man precedes another. Each in turn vanishes until immortality is confronted in the last sentence: ‘Adam, who was the son of God!’ The first mortal son of God uncrowned and led away from his kingdom, by a woman, to death! The twain go down together, each ruinous to the other, with nothing left them but a hope; and that hope rested upon a to them mysterious promise: ‘The seed of the woman shall crush the head of the serpent!’ It would have staggered their faith had one told them that in God’s revenges, all[542] compensating, all healing, she that led down was of the sex that should lead upward. Out of their darkness there came a seeming dawn, and Eve cried ecstatically at the birth of Cain:
 
‘I have gotten a man from the Lord!’
 
“They thought he was a token of renewed favor and probably the redeemer from the curse. He turned out a murderer, and introduced them to the supreme horror of humanity—death. The conflict of light and darkness went on, and the first pair tasted death themselves, looking along the horizon of unrealized hopes to the last and waiting, as all their posterity through painful centuries waited, for the Man that was to save. The long years with leaden tread marched on, struggles amid suffering weighty and countless, accompanied the race; of them all woman bore the heavier part, but she kept somehow the larger hope. Each Jewish mother, with a pride of sex secretly cherished, watched and longed for the coming from herself of the ONE who was to lift her up and crown her queen, indeed.
 
“God at last gathered all woman’s trustful hopings into one great answered prayer, and deigning, in sovereign love, His marvelous co-operation, brought forth another and a perfect Adam.
 
“We are informed that Joseph and Mary went, about the time of Jesus’ birth, in compliance with Roman law, to Bethlehem to pay their personal taxes. The Roman tax lists were based upon the records of family descent so far as concerned the Jews.
 
“To make the collection certain beyond the possibility of any one’s escape, the law required each taxable subject to pay his allotted tribute in the city of his nativity. The father and mother of Jesus were cited[543] to the city of David. Thither they went. And so in the providence of God it happened that pagan Rome was summoned to the cradle of the infant Savior and made unwittingly an attester to all time that He was of a family by right recorded among those descended from great David.
 
“The son and the mother ............