s fatal illness that he must have
caused the slaughter of the infants at Bethlehem" (Matt. 2:16-18).

The mortal end of the tyrant and multi-murderer is thus treated by
Farrar in his _Life of Christ_, pp. 54, 55:--"It must have been very
shortly after the murder of the innocents that Herod died. Only five
days before his death he had made a frantic attempt at suicide, and had
ordered the execution of his eldest son Antipater. His death-bed, which
once more reminds us of Henry VIII., was accompanied by circumstances of
peculiar horror; and it has been asserted that he died of a loathsome
disease, which is hardly mentioned in history, except in the case of men
who have been rendered infamous by an atrocity of persecuting zeal. On
his bed of intolerable anguish, in that splendid and luxurious palace
which he had built for himself, under the palms of Jericho, swollen with
disease and scorched by thirst, ulcerated externally and glowing
inwardly with a 'soft slow fire,' surrounded by plotting sons and
plundering slaves, detesting all and detested by all, longing for death
as a release from his tortures yet dreading it as the beginning of worse
terrors, stung by remorse yet still unslaked with murder, a horror to
all around him yet in his guilty conscience a worse terror to himself,
devoured by the premature corruption of an anticipated grave, eaten of
worms as though visibly smitten by the finger of God's wrath after
seventy years of successful villainy, the wretched old man, whom men had
called the Great, lay in savage frenzy awaiting his last hour. As he
knew that none would shed one tear for him, he determined that they
should shed many for themselves, and issued an order that, under pain of
death, the principal families of the kingdom and the chiefs of the
tribes should come to Jericho. They came, and then, shutting them in the
hippodrome, he secretly commanded his sister Salome that at the moment
of his death they should all be massacred. And so, choking as it were
with blood, devising massacres in its very delirium, the soul of Herod
passed forth into the night."

For mention of the Temple of Herod see Note 5, following Chapter 6.

4. Gifts from the Wise Men to the Child Jesus.--The scriptural account
of the visit of the wise men to Jesus and His mother states that they
"fell down and worshipped him," and furthermore that "when they had
opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and
frankincense, an