e who was nearest to her. I've wondered why Joseph, too, was not
told of the plan of God when Mary was, and so she be spared this sore
suspicion. I think it was because he simply _could_ not have taken it in
beforehand, though he rose so nobly when he was told. Her experience was
unavoidable, humanly speaking.

That hastily improvised cradle was in rather a rough spot for both mother
and babe. The hasty fleeing for several days and nights to Egypt, with
those heart-rending cries of the grief-stricken mothers of Bethlehem
haunting their ears, the cautious return, and then apparently the change
of plans from a home in historic Bethlehem to the much less favoured
village of Nazareth,--it was all a pretty rough beginning on a very rough
road. It was a sort of prophetic beginning. There proved to be
blood-shedding at both ends, and each time innocent blood, too.

The word Nazareth has become a high fence hiding from view thirty of the
thirty-three years. Was this the dead-level, monotonous stretch of the
road, from the time of the early teens on to the full maturity of thirty?
Yet it proved later to have a dangerously rough place on the precipice
side of the town. It seems rather clear that Joseph and Mary would have
much preferred some other place, their own family town, cultured
Bethlehem, for rearing this child committed to their care. But the serious
danger involved decided the choice of the less desirable town for their
home.[24]

But the roughest part began when our Lord Jesus turned His feet from the
shaded seclusion of Nazareth, and turned into the open road. At once came
the Wilderness, the place of terrific temptation, and of intense spirit
conflict. The fact of temptation was intensified by the length of it.
Forty long days the lone struggle lasted. The time test is the hardest
test. The greatest strength is the strength that wears, doesn't wear out.
That Wilderness had stood for sin's worst scar on the earth's surface.
Since then it has stood for the most terrific and lengthened-out
siege-attack by the Evil One upon a human being. Satan himself came and
rallied all the power of cunning and persistence at his command. He did
his damnable worst and best.

In an art gallery at Moscow is a painting by a Russian artist of "Christ
in the Wilderness," which reverently and with simple dramatic power brings
to you the intense humanity of our Lord, and how tremendously real to Him
the temptation was. This helps to inten