The Star of the Wise Men; Being a Commentary on the Second Chapter of St. Matthew (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: fraud, trickery, and imposture, especially when they ceased to be exercised by a responsible guide, but by every man upon his own account. Seeing that the word Magian is thus a middle term, and of twofold use,1 the question has often presenteditself; In which sense does St. Matthew use it ? Is the title given to these visitors of the cradle of the infant Lord in its first and more honourable, or in its second and ignobler, sense. Calling them Magi, does the Evangelist mean to urge their wisdom, or their magic ? and is their coming a testimony and a foretaste of the manner in which all the highest wisdom of this world comes and does homage to Him, who of God is made unto us wisdom, in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom or knowledge ? or is it a renouncing of wicked arts in the person of the chief adepts thereof, a parallel to that later burning of their magical books on the part of the Ephesian converts, (Acts xix. 19, ) a manifest token of the dissolution of all sorceries and charms before the simplicity of the Gospel; and, more generally, a preluding to the calling of great sinners, the Matthews, the Zacchaeuses, and the like, to the knowledge of Christ ? 1 The wish which has been sometimes expressed, that our translators had rendered throughout the same Greek word by the same English, (and of course, where practicable, words different in the original by different in the translation, ) is shown, by the single example of this word, to be one with which it would have been impossible entirely to comply. Doubtless, if their attention had been more directed to (his point, they might have done, and it would have been to advantage in many ways if they had done, more in this respect than actually they have. In the occasional needless, and sometimes in their degree injur...