Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/22

10 tation.* China and Confucius were looking for the saint from the West. Rome was expecting a monarch from the East; and neither one nor the other was mistaken. The subject of the magnificent Indian epics, the Incarnation of the Divinity, was really about to be accomplished in Judea, between the East and the West.

The Messiah was actually born in a poor shed at Bethlehem, near Jerusalem ; and immediately three "kings of the East" three magi, who had been living in anxious expectation of the event, betook themselves to the spot where they were told they should find the Divine infant. At the same time, the emperor of the Indies, alarmed by the general diffusion of prophecies, which he supposed to menace the fall of his empire and his own ruin, sent out messengers to inquire whether in any place such a child had really been born, and if they found him, to put him to death. The horrible massacre ordered by Herod, from the same motives, is well known.

Finally, some years afterwards, a Chinese emperor himself accompanied an embassy to the West, in order to seek the supreme saint, who was to be born in that

The English reader will remember the lines in Milton's Hymn of the Nativity, — "No war or battle's sound Was heard, the world around The idle spear and shield were high uphung; The hooked chariot stood Unstained with hostile blood, The trumpet spake not to the armed throng, And kings sat still with awful eye, As if they surely knew, their sov'reign Lord was by."