THE THREE KINGS.
COUNTRY roads in winter have a charm and a mystery that summer loses. There is an inimitable purity of atmosphere in a wet mild season when the air is full of chill exhalations, and the transparencies of wintry sunshine fill all the shadows and leafless boughs with lurking tender tones of colour. In the tangle of the long hedges there is a subdued radiance of berries, and perhaps one hawthorn still in a golden blaze, like the bush that burned in the wilderness. The wet, interminable roads, with their unending wheel-tracks, have an air of mystery, as if, when they go away indefinitely towards the horizon that melts as you look, they should touch there the limit of some other world unknown. You never feel quite sure what may not come fromfar away between the vanishing parallels of the hedges, because they are a perpetual reminder that from end to end of the earth there are feet going up and down, ceaselessly measuring the long highways of the -world.
All over Christian Europe, generations ago, along such roads as these, the Three Kings used to come riding into quiet town and village during the .Feast of the Nativity, and all the people would go out to greet the strangers coming with tidings from far away. There is no story in the Bible -upon which the imagination of the Middle Ages fastened with such eagerness as on this of the Three Wise Men. The exquisite beauty of the narrative takes the heart captive now as then with some occult fascination ; the glamour of far-off lands and ways unknown lies in it. "When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judrea in the days of Herod the King, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, Where is be that is born King of the Jews ? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him." The play of The Three Kings was one of the most popular religious plays of the Middle Ages, and the childlike imagina- tion of early writers, fascinated by the simplicity of the narrative, filled in all sorts of detail, after the fashion of children with a favourite story. John Goldenmouth said the Wise Men must be Kings, since David had prophesied that the Kings of Arabia and Saba should bring gifts ; St. Leo fixed their number at three; and then there was the story of how Herod burned the ships at Tarshish in his fury against them; how-they were led by an angel in the form of a child, —the angel of the shepherds; how they were baptised by St. Thomas on his way to India, died Christians, and were buried at Cologne. Then when the fifteenth century took to the dogma of symbolism it represented one King, Balthazar, as "fescue," taking the three to symbolise the three races of mankind. Their names were used on amulets and in conjurations. Up till the eighteenth century the Return of the Magi was kept in Italy on March 1st as a highly popular
festival, and in our own day Provençal peasant boys went out with cakes and flowers to greet the Three Kings riding in to the stable, over the windy plains, as in days of old they had come with gifts from far away.
Most of us still, however civilised, know the fascination of far horizons and how they draw the heart. And in the Middle Ages horizons were even more extended than are those of the modern universe, because the seen and the unseen were more near each other. And also the continual going up and down along the roads of -the -world of travellers to far-off lands kept the simple and untravelled in perpetual assurance of a world not realised marvellously near at hand. Travellers brought tales of monster and marvel ; Crusader and pilgrim from the East, where Copt and Arab kept the tradition of the exact localities of Bible story, told how the "doleful creatures" of Scripture were still found in the Holy Places delivered to the Saracen, bow the pelican and the porcupine, the owl and dragon, the aspic and the basilisk and the fiery flying serpent, still haunted the wastes, and how the night- monster settled and the satyr cried to his fellow among the reedy desolations of Eastern lands. The literal faith of the people, that made plays of the mysteries of their religion, preserved the conviction of the unseen whole and strong in them. The strangeness of the visible world was a pledge of the wonders of the next. It produced a lively and practical sense of death in the world, because always close at hand were the fearful jaws of that Leviathan which Job and Isaiah told of—the grievous hell of Christian dogma— who had "enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoicetb, shall descend into it." In such a world, with heaven all about and the pit beneath, who could tell what marvellous thing might not come suddenly out of the void into the humble ways of daily life ?—like the angels of early artists, who came out of eternity at a touch, breaking in upon the material world in a sudden vision, with the stir of incredible swiftness on their wings and hair.
The poverty of the stable enthralled the hearts of high and low in a universal appeal to pity and tenderness ; and then, too, they were held and fascinated by the mystery of the strangers bringing gifts from far away with &lurking prophecy of death in them, gold and incense and "myrrh for mortality." The majesty and wisdom and strangeness of earth were bowed down there together with the ignorant and simple ; the uncouth dromedary of the East and the humble beasts of the stable stood side by side where Kings and shepherds worshipped together with the symbol of death in their hands. There was a piercing tenderness in the human appeal of the gift :— " Hail be thou, Lord long looked for, I have brought thee myrrh for mortality."
Here was homage to the champion who should go clown into the darkness beneath to fulfil prophecy. "Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming " ; the people that sat in darkness were to see a great light when the gates of brass were broken and the Conqueror went down to barrow hell with the print of the nails in His hands. The literal faith of the age gave an incomparable dramatic force to the apostrophe : "Lift up your heads, 0 ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors : and the King of glory shall come in."—" Who is the King of glory ? " came back again from the throng of souls within the shadow of death; "It is the Lord strong and mighty, even the Lord mighty in battle."
The pagan dead went away into silence. In the cold place between the worlds the valiant fighters of the North lay down impotent like ante in the darkness, all their strength for- gotten. And from the sunshine and the warm, busy Southern earth men went away into the silent presence of a fearful immortality, the Queen of Shadows, gentle and awful, with poppies in her folded hands.
The story of the Three Kings bringing gifts from far away is full of an occult sense of power over death, as if mortality should bear for ever the inaudible stir of worlds unseen lying close at hand : "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust," when the Wise Man comes from the East with his offering :— "Hail be thou, Lord long looked for, I have brought thee myrrh for mortality."
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