Read Ebook: The Christmas city by Leary Lewis Gaston

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Ebook has 188 lines and 17375 words, and 4 pages

PAGE

THE CHARTER OF PRE-EMINENCE 17

I THE WELCOME TO BETHLEHEM 21

II THE GRAVE BY THE ROADSIDE 25

V THE ADVENTURE OF THE WELL 51

VI THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS 59

X THE SCHOLAR IN THE CAVE 93

PAGE

The Tomb of Rachel 31

The Church of the Nativity 79

The South Transept of the Church of the Nativity and one of the Stairways leading down to the Sacred Caves 97

St. Jerome and the Lion 123

The Bethlehem Road 133

Bethlehem Girls 137

Bethlehem 149

Interior of the Church of the Nativity 161

The Altar of the Nativity 169

THE CHARTER OF PRE-EMINENCE

Micah 5: 2-5

"But thou, Bethlehem Ephrathah, which art little to be among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting.... And he shall stand, and shall feed his flock in the strength of Jehovah, in the majesty of the name of Jehovah his God: and they shall abide; for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth.

"And this man shall be our peace."

THE CHRISTMAS CITY

THE WELCOME TO BETHLEHEM

St. Paula, A. D. 386

"With what expressions and what language shall we set before you the cave of the Saviour? The stall where He cried as a babe can best be honored by silence; words are inadequate to speak its praise. Where are the spacious porticoes? Where are the gilded ceilings? Where are the mansions furnished by the miserable toil of doomed wretches? Where are the costly halls raised by untitled opulence for man's vile body to walk in? Where are the roofs that intercept the sky, as if anything could be finer than the expanse of heaven? Behold, in this poor crevice of the earth the Creator of the heavens was born; here He was wrapped in swaddling clothes; here He was seen by the shepherds; here He was pointed out by the star; here He was adored by the wise men....

"In our excitement we are already hurrying to meet you.... Will the day never come when we shall together enter the Saviour's cave?

"Hail, Bethlehem, house of bread, wherein was born that Bread that came down from heaven! Hail, Ephrathah, land of fruitfulness and fertility, whose Fruit is the Lord himself."

THE GRAVE BY THE ROADSIDE

The history of Bethlehem is the romance of Bethlehem; a story of love and daring, of brave men and beautiful women. We do not know that story in great detail; but here and there across the centuries, the light breaks on the little Judean town and we catch a fleeting glimpse of some scene of tender affection or chivalrous adventure. And it is striking to notice how many of these incidents involve womanly devotion and self-sacrifice, both before and after the Most Blessed of Women suffered and rejoiced in Bethlehem.

Long, long centuries before that first Christmas was dreamed of, the story of Bethlehem begins. And lo, the earliest episode has to do with a birth day.

In the yellow evening light a little band of nomadic shepherds is straggling along the dusty road past the high, gray walls of the outer fortifications of Jerusalem--not Jerusalem the Holy City, but Jerusalem the Jebusite stronghold, which is to remain heathen and hateful for a thousand years until, in that far-distant future, the arrogant fortress shall fall before the onslaughts of the mighty men of David.

At the head of the long line of herds and pack-animals and armed retainers walks the chief, Jacob ben-Isaac. A generation before, he had passed along this same ancient caravan route going northward; but no one would recognize that frightened, homesick fugitive in the grave, self-confident leader who travels southward to-day. For now he is Sheikh Jacob, full of years and riches and wisdom; Jacob the strong man, the successful man and, in his own rude way, the good man.

An hour's journey beyond Jerusalem there appear shining on a hilltop to the left the white stone houses of Bethlehem, at the sight of which the tired herdsmen grow more cheerful and the slow-moving caravan quickens somewhat its pace; for close under those protecting walls the tribe of B'nai Jacob will shelter its flocks for the night, safe alike from wolves and from marauding Arab bands.

But just as they reach the spot where the road to Bethlehem branches off to the left from the main caravan route, there is a sudden change of plan. The hope of camping at the town is abandoned, and one of the low, black, goat-hair tents is hastily set up right by the roadside. Then there is an excited bustling among the household servants, and a time of anxious waiting for Sheikh Jacob, until Bilhah, the handmaid, puts into the old man's arms his son Benjamin, his youngest boy, who is long to be the comfort of the father's declining years.

Soon, however, the cries of rejoicing are hushed. From the women's quarters comes a loud, shrill wail of grief. And before the B'nai Jacob break camp again the leader raises a heap of stones over the grave of Rachel--his Rachel--a gray-haired woman now and bent with toil, but still to him the beautiful girl whom he loved and for whom he labored and sinned those twice seven long years in the strength of his young manhood.

Many years afterward, when Benjamin was a grown man and Jacob lay dying in the distant land of Egypt, the thoughts of the homesick old sheikh dwelt on the lonely grave by the roadside.

"I buried her there on the way to Bethlehem," he said.

Her tombstone remains "unto this day," the Hebrew narrator adds. Indeed, even to our own day, a spot by the Bethlehem road, about a mile from the town, is pointed out as the burial place of Rachel. Probably no site in Palestine is attested by the witness of so continuous a line of historians and travelers. For many centuries the grave was marked by a pyramid of stones. The present structure, with its white dome, is only about four hundred years old. But there it stands "unto this day," revered by Christians, Jews and Moslems, and the wandering Arabs bring their dead to be buried in its holy shadow.

Such is the first Biblical reference to Bethlehem. A son was born there! More significant still, there was a vicarious sacrifice--a laying down of one life for another.

THE GIRL FROM BEYOND JORDAN

In the Book of Judges are recounted the adventures which befell certain Bethlehemites in those lawless days when "there was no king in Israel and every man did that which was right in his own eyes." But the people mentioned in this history were no longer dwelling in the city of their birth; and we are glad of an excuse to pass by the tale of reckless crime and merciless vengeance. Yet here, too, if the story were not too cruel to repeat, we should find a woman dying for one whom she loved.

Even in that rough frontier period, however, there were interludes of peace and kindliness; and like the cooling breeze which blows from snow-capped Lebanon upon the burning brow of the Syrian reaper, is the sense of grateful refreshment when we turn from the heartrending monotony of scenes of cruelty and lust and treachery to the sweet, clean air of the whitening harvest fields of Boaz of Bethlehem.

When the two strange women entered the square there was great excitement among the chattering busy-bodies who were waiting their turn to fill their earthen jars at the public well; for one of the travelers was seen to be no other than old Naomi, who long years before had gone away across Jordan with her husband Elimelech to better their fortunes among the famous farm-lands of Moab. Now the wanderer has returned to the old home, poor and widowed and childless--no doubt to the secret gratification of the more cautious stay-at-homes, who had never dared tempt fortune by such an emigration to distant Moab, and who were still no richer and no poorer than their fathers' fathers had been.

The other woman was younger, a foreigner, a widow, so the gossip ran, who had married Naomi's dead son. The women at the well smiled at her quaint accent, for the dialect of Moab is quite different from that of the Bethlehem district. But many a stalwart young farmer dreamed that night of the lonely, appealing eyes of the stranger from beyond Jordan.

Even middle-aged Boaz is stirred when the next morning he finds the slender Moabitess among the women who are gleaning in his barley field; for romance is not always dead in the soul of a mature and wealthy landowner. Boaz, for all his grizzling hair, is a hero who makes us feel very warm and comfortable about the heart. He is so generous, so thoughtful, so humble in his final happiness. He has already been touched by the story of the faithfulness of the young widow who said to her mother-in-law,

"Entreat me not to leave thee, and to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."

So the rich man drops a hint to his servants to let fall carelessly little heaps of grain where the new gleaner can easily gather them. He remembers the rough, dissolute character of the itinerant harvesters, and warns them to treat the young woman with respect and courtesy. At noontime he invites her to share the simple luncheon provided for the farm-hands. A few weeks later the lonely rich man discovers her affection for him, and our hearts beat in sympathy with his as, with characteristic modesty, he exclaims,

"Blessed be thou of Jehovah, my daughter: thou hast shown more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning, inasmuch as thou followedest not young men, whether poor or rich."

But as well might one attempt to retouch the soft colorings of the Judean sunrise as to re-tell the beautiful idyll of Ruth. Old Josephus quite misses the delicate beauty of the story; for he concludes his smug paraphrase by saying, "I was therefore obliged to recount this history of Ruth, because I had a mind to demonstrate the power of God, who, without difficulty, can raise those that are of ordinary parents to dignity and splendor."

They lived together happily ever afterward. Even sad Naomi found a new interest in life when she took into her lonely old arms the form of little Obed. For this bit of Bethlehem history, like the first, and like the greatest later on, ends with the coming of a baby boy. And doubtless, if the whole of the tale were told us, we should some day see grandmother Ruth crooning over Obed's son Jesse, who was to be the father of a king.

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