The Holy Innocents

Our next type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy drives us with shout and cry from its pleasant melancholy, as if we were trespassers in such a gentle world. Yet it is not altogether a scene of unmingled violence which is coming. But who does not know those plaintive sounds, sad in themselves, but sadder in their circumstances, which can sometimes extinguish even the shining of bright light, making one sense master another, like the cry of the lapwing among ruins? So is it with us now. Like silent apparitions, Simeon and Anna pass away. We hear loud voices and shrill expostulations, as of women in misery talking all at once, like a jargon in the summer woods when the birds have risen against the hawk, and then the fearful cry of excited lamentation, with the piteous moaning of the infant victims mingled with the inconsolable wailing of their brave, powerless mothers. It is the massacre of the Holy Innocents. Yet even this dismal scene is a scene of worship. Tragic as it is, it has a quiet side, and a beauty which, blood-stained though it be, is not unbecoming to the meek majesty of Bethlehem. Alas! how the anguish of those mothers, that were so inconsiderate to her who was on the point of becoming a mother like themselves, and how the wrathful but more silent misery of the fathers, is expiating in its own streets the inhospitality of Bethlehem.

But those little ones are mighty saints of God, and their infant cries were a most articulate revelation of many of His mysterious ways. The apparent contradiction that innocence should do penance is one of the primary laws of the Incarnation. The Infant Saviour Himself began it. It was involved in the state of humiliation in which He came. It was part of the pathos of a fallen world. But none shared it with Him at Bethlehem, except the Holy Innocents. To Mary He brought a new access of heavenly joy, and when the tender hand of Simeon was nerved by the Holy Ghost to plant in her heart the first of the seven swords she was to bear, it was the untimely woe of Calvary that pierced her soul, and not the penances of Bethlehem. To Joseph the joy the Infant brought was yet more unmingled. The Baptist leaped with exultation in his mother's womb when the Babe came near. The Angels sang because the mystery was full of jubilee. To the Shepherds it was good tidings of great joy, and to the Kings contentment and delight. To Simeon and Anna also He came as light, and peace, and satisfaction, and jubilee. His brightness had made earth so dull, that all which was left them now was speedily to die. But the Holy Innocents joined their infant cries with His. To them the glad Christmas and the singing Angels brought but blood and death. They were the first martyrs of the Word, and their guilt was His - that they were born in Bethlehem.

Renewing the miracle which He had wrought for John the Baptist, Our Lord is said to have conferred the full use of reason, with immense and magnificent graces, on these little ones at the moment of their martyrdom, so that they might see Him in the clear splendor of their faith, might voluntarily accept of death for His sake, and might accompany their sacrifice by the loftiest acts of supernatural holiness and heroism. The revelations of the saints also tell us of the singular power now accorded in heaven to these infant martyrs, especially in connection with deathbeds, and Saint Francis of Sales died, reiterating with marked emphasis and significance the invocation of the Holy Innocents. They too were beautiful figures in the court of Bethlehem. They were children like the Prince of Bethlehem Himself. They were His companions in nativity. His mates in age and size; and though it was no slight thing to have these natural alliances with Him, by grace they were much more, for they were likenesses of Him, and they were His martyrs. A twofold light shines in the faces of this infant crowd, the light of Mary, and the light of Jesus. They resembled Mary in their sinless purity; for even if Our Lord had not constituted them in a state of grace before, their original sin would be more than expiated by their guileless blood, when it was shed for Him. It was a fearful font, a most bloody sacrament, at which an Infant like themselves held them as their godfather, that they might lie in His paternal bosom for evermore. They were like Mary in their martyrdom for Jesus, as all the martyrs were; but they were like her also, in that their martyrdom was as it were the act of Jesus Himself. He was the sword which slew them. He was the proximate cause of all they suffered. It is only more remotely so with the other martyrs. This is one of their distinctions. They resembled her also in their nearness to Jesus. They were among the few who were admitted into the heirarchy of the Incarnation. Their souls were amidst the attendants who waited on His Human Soul when He rose on Easter morning, and who ascended with Him into heaven. But the light of Jesus also was in their faces. It was not only in the material similitudes of being born when He was born, and where He was born, that they were like Him. They resembled Him with a most divine truthfulness, by being bidden to counterfeit Him. Their mission was to represent Him, to stand in His place, to be supposed to contain Him among themselves.

Simeon and Anna lived long lives before they reached their work, and it was laid gently at their doors at the very extremity of life. Their earthly work lay almost at the threshold of heaven. The lot of the Innocents was the reverse of this. They were just born, and their mission was handed to them instantly and abruptly, and its fulfillment was death. Yet in what a sense is it true of all of us, that we are but born to die! Happy they who find the great wisdom which lies in that little truth! But there was more than this in their likeness to Our Lord. In one way they outstripped Him. They died for Him as He died for all. They paid Him back the life He laid down for them. Nay, they were beforehand with Him, for they laid down their lives for Him, before He laid His down for them. They saved His life. They put off His Calvary. They secured to us His sweet parables. His glorious miracles, and those abysses of His grown-up Passion, in which the souls of the redeemed dwell in their proper element, like fish within the deep. Yet, again, is there not a sense in which we all pay our dear Lord back with our lives for the life that He gave us? What is a Christian life but a lingering death, of which physical death is but the last consummating act; and if it be not all for Christ, how is it a Christian life? Nevertheless, in the historical reality of all this lies the grand prerogative of the Holy Innocents.

Notwithstanding their miraculous use of reason, they are still types to us of that devotion so common among the higher saints, the devotion of almost unconscious mortification. They are like those who commit themselves to God, and then take what is sure to come. They not only commit themselves to Him without conditions, but they do not count the cost, because to them His love is cheaply bought at the price of all possible sacrifices. Hence there is no cost to count. The truest mortification does not forecast, because it is self-oblivious. Thus it was with James and John, when they offered to drink our Saviour's cup;, and how heroically they did drink it, when it came! Thus it is that heroic mortification is so often taken by surprise, and men, who cannot discern the saints aright, think that the grandeur of their purpose for a moment faltered, when all the while the surprise was only stirring up deeper depths of grace, and meriting the more divinely. These infant martyrs represent also what must in its measure befall everyone who* draws near to Jesus. Suffering goes out of Him like an atmosphere. The air is charged with the seed of crosses, and the soul is sown all over with them before it is aware.

Moreover, the cross is a quick growth, and can spring up, and blossom, and bear fruit almost in a night, while from its vivacious root a score of fresh crosses will spring up and cover the soul with the peculiar verdure of Calvary. They that come nearest to Our Lord are those who suffer most, and who suffer the most unselfishly. With His use of reason He could have spoken and complained; so might the Innocents, but they worshipped only with their cries. One moment they were made aware of the full value of their dear lives, and the next moment they were of their own accord to give them up, and not to let their newly-given reason plead, but even to hide it with the cries of unreasoning infancy. Never were martyrs placed under so peculiar a trial. How well they teach the old lesson, that unselfishness is its own reward; and that to hold our tongues about our wrongs is to create a new fountain of happiness within ourselves, which only needs the shade of secrecy to be perennial! If they paid dear for the honor of being the fellow-townsmen of Our Lord, how magnificent were the graces, which none but He could have accumulated in that short moment, and which He gave to them with such a regal plenitude! To be near Jesus was the height of happiness, yet it was also both a necessity and a privilege of suffering. We cannot spare the Holy Innocents from the beautiful world of Bethlehem. Next to Mary and Joseph, we could take them away least of all. Without them we should read the riddle of the Incarnation wrong, by missing many of its deepest laws. They are symbols to us of the necessities of nearness to Our Lord. They are the living laws of the vicinity of Jesus. Softened through long ages, the mothers' cries and the children's moans come to us almost as a sad strain of music, sweeter than it is sad, sweet even because it is so sad, the moving elegy of Bethlehem.

- text taken from the book Bethlehem, by Father Frederick William Faber