THE CORONATION OF THE QUEEN.
“My knowledge is so weak, oh, blissful queen,
To tell abroad thy mighty worthiness,
That I the weight of it may not sustain;
But as a child of twelve months’ old or less
That laboreth his language to express,
Even so fare I and therefore pray,
Guide thou my song which I of thee may say.”—WORDSWORTH.
“If I could only carry to Bethany what I feel now!” ejaculated the young
chaplain, as he hurried along from the knights’ celebration of Pentecost,
homeward, at the time that the Moslems were summoned to evening prayers
by the minaret calls.
After his greeting, on arriving at his abode, his first words were: “I’ve
seen the crowns of fire, and now comprehend the meaning of Pentecost,
where men gathered from varied climes, heard each the spirit’s message in
his own tongue! The Spirit is the interpreter!”
“By what aid came this revelation?”
“God and the Hospitaler.”
“We have the first here; let us call the other, that the temple on the
hill be made to feel the glow. The time is opportune, for each day
witnesses new triumphs of our cause.”
When the knight arrived a feast was in progress. His air awed those to
whom he was a stranger, and there were not a few who thought within
themselves,
“Is he a prophet?”
Abruptly, as usual, he began:
“Friends: I would that all hearts here were moved by justice to enthrone
the Queen whose praise your frank youths have been sincerely singing. I
am here to-day to proclaim her rights, and in so doing I shall appeal to
that sure word which survives when all else fails. She was of David’s
royal line; the noblest one of all the earth. To the proof? The Christian
Scriptures, from the hands of Matthew and Luke, present her ancestral
descent. These apostles wrote as God directed, and, after all, only
reaffirmed that already set forth in the most carefully, religiously
guarded records of all antiquity, the Jewish genealogical tables.
“You know that the ancient Jews held those tables in sacred regard, for
on their integrity depended the proof of the things to them most dear,
as they believed. By them every Jew could trace his Abrahamic descent,
and to Abraham’s seed were all the great promises of the covenant. By
those tables they proved their title to the land of promise, Canaan.
Every Jew, believing himself one of God’s chosen people, and that his
advancement and the advancement of his posterity in the Divine favor,
depended on the purity of the blood of both, felt that he needed the
guidance of those tables to preserve him from any admixture with alien or
Gentile blood. The Aaronic priesthood was hereditary and the priesthood
was initial in the religious system of the Hebrews. Its legitimacy was
preserved chiefly by these hereditary charters. Then all true Israelites
looked for the coming of a Savior, Priest and King to bring to the chosen
transcendent glory, and to win an universal dominion, marked by love, joy
and peace. Every Jew knew that Great One was to spring from the house of
David, and all within that Judaic line hoping that he or his children
might be near akin to the One to come, carefully, constantly, proudly
guarded and studied these records of descent. Birth was the foundation
upon which all Jewish institutions were founded. ‘_So all Israel was
reckoned by genealogies._’ They lived in a reign of blood, and in blood
to be Jewishly thoroughbred was, they thought, to be most highly favored.
They had not yet discerned the law of the new dispensation, which
declares all men akin; a dispensation seeking to build up a superior
humanity by first of all transforming and exalting the inner life. By the
revered records of these Jewish patriarchs, both holy and love-ladened,
place the writings of Matthew and Luke, and with concurrent testimony,
unimpeachable as well as conclusive, the legitimacy of Jesus the son of
Mary is proven! He was beyond a cavil of David’s kingly line. There were
Christ-haters who contested at every point His claim of Messiahship. They
forged lies freely; they hurled after Him slanders innumerable; they
insinuated that He was born in fornication; they affected to flee from
Him as one having a devil; they denounced Him to Jewish as well as Roman
authorities as a liar, a seducer of men and a traitor. In a word, they
howled Him down in every way they could, unabashed by the splendor of His
baptismal indorsement, unsilenced by the awful warnings of His cross. But
in their desperation they never dared to challenge the records which
proved Him ‘_the son of David_.’ Now had His claims rested upon His
relations to His earthly father, Joseph, they would have been disproven.
All Jewry would have quickly, fiercely proclaimed Him a pretender and
not in the family of promise. The Christ was heir of David’s name and
fame because His mother was, and so in exalting Him you crown the saintly
woman who bore Him! He was the adopted son of Joseph, type of all His
followers, adopted sons of a Royal Father. He was legitimate through his
mother, type of all his followers, brought into the royal family of God
by the power of a mystic new birth.
“But there is another line running backward, preserved through the
centuries to connect the first Adam with this last one. This line runs
from Christ through his mother to Eden. Behold the august truth suspended
by that chain of names! Names; only names of the dead! names of the
forgotten! Jesus by Mary is linked to the chain! It’s an old, old chain,
but yet it has gems in its links. Each named is the child of another
living before, and the history of each is recorded in two words, ‘begat,’
‘died.’ A chain of dust! One man precedes another. Each in turn vanishes
until immortality is confronted in the last sentence: ‘_Adam, who was
the son of God!_’ The first mortal son of God uncrowned and led away
from his kingdom, by a woman, to death! The twain go down together, each
ruinous to the other, with nothing left them but a hope; and that hope
rested upon a to them mysterious promise: ‘_The seed of the woman shall
crush the head of the serpent!_’ It would have staggered their faith had
one told them that in God’s revenges, all compensating, all healing,
she that led down was of the sex that should lead upward. Out of their
darkness there came a seeming dawn, and Eve cried ecstatically at the
birth of Cain:
‘I have gotten a man from the Lord!’
“They thought he was a token of renewed favor and probably the redeemer
from the curse. He turned out a murderer, and introduced them to the
supreme horror of humanity—death. The conflict of light and darkness went
on, and the first pair tasted death themselves, looking along the horizon
of unrealized hopes to the last and waiting, as all their posterity
through painful centuries waited, for the Man that was to save. The long
years with leaden tread marched on, struggles amid suffering weighty and
countless, accompanied the race; of them all woman bore the heavier part,
but she kept somehow the larger hope. Each Jewish mother, with a pride of
sex secretly cherished, watched and longed for the coming from herself of
the ONE who was to lift her up and crown her queen, indeed.
“God at last gathered all woman’s trustful hopings into one great
answered prayer, and deigning, in sovereign love, His marvelous
co-operation, brought forth another and a perfect Adam.
“We are informed that Joseph and Mary went, about the time of Jesus’
birth, in compliance with Roman law, to Bethlehem to pay their personal
taxes. The Roman tax lists were based upon the records of family descent
so far as concerned the Jews.
“To make the collection certain beyond the possibility of any one’s
escape, the law required each taxable subject to pay his allotted tribute
in the city of his nativity. The father and mother of Jesus were cited
to the city of David. Thither they went. And so in the providence of God
it happened that pagan Rome was summoned to the cradle of the infant
Savior and made unwittingly an attester to all time that He was of a
family by right recorded among those descended from great David.
“The son and the mother here stand or fall together. If Mary was not of
David’s line, then the Son she bore was not, and He is left without proof
of being of the seed of David.
“Joseph was not the father of the Christ _after the flesh_. The lives of
mother and son are eternally intertwined. If we honor one we must needs
honor the other; abating the fame of one we degrade the other.
“Jesus’ claims to being the Messiah depended upon the fact that His
mother was of the tribe and family royal. The absolute requirements
of prophecy can only be met in the Messiah by His being of the House
of David. Jesus himself admitted and fairly met this necessity. So
he questioned the Pharisees: ‘What think ye of Christ? Whose son is
he?’ ‘They say unto him, the Son of David.’ Admitting this, the Savior
propounded the question involving sonship and spiritual unity with God
which His questioners could not answer:
“‘If David then call him Lord, how is he son?’
“‘_Neither durst any man from that day forth ask Him any more questions._’
“Had He denied the necessity of Davidic origin they could have
overwhelmed Him with Scriptures. Had he not been of that family the most
ignorant Jew would have promptly rejected His claims to being the Hope of
Israel.
“Peter the apostle, amid the soul-trying solemnities of Pentecost,
speaking to the representatives of people from all parts of the earth
and for all time, cried: ‘Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you
concerning the Patriarch David: Being a prophet, and knowing God had
sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his loins, _according to
the flesh_, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne.’
“This orator spoke then with the accuracy of one in the presence of the
Holy Ghost, and not only made sincere, but illuminated, by the torch of
God. This is conclusive, but the reiteratives of the inspired writers
justify us in presenting their cumulative evidence.
“After Peter comes the learned Hebrew of the Hebrews, Paul; before his
conversion to Christianity declaring himself to have been ‘after the most
straightest sect a Pharisee;’ after that conversion, rejoicing to the end
of life, as of the true, new Israel by faith in Him that makest all new.
“Twice Paul met Mary’s son mysteriously, face to face, within the very
confines of Glory. Let Paul speak: ‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ,
separated unto the gospel of God, concerning His Son, our Lord, which was
made of the seed of David according to the flesh!’
“Let us not longer make a mock of eternal, holy verities! Christ was of
David’s flesh through His mother, and born to be a real king of a real
kingdom, not a phantom kingdom! That kingdom must come; yea, blessed be
Jehovah! it is coming.
“Joseph, the putative father of Jesus, adopted Jesus as his son, but he
could not, by that legal act, make his foster son, whose father was the
Holy Spirit of the seed of David, _after the flesh_! Jesus received,
then, His royal blood from Mary, and bore His Kingly title after the
flesh as ‘_the crown wherewith his mother crowned Him_.’ Revelations
harmonize; Luke and Matthew must therefore agree with Paul and Peter.
“The tables of Luke and Matthew agree down to David’s time, but then
they diverge, until they are converged in Jesus, through the undoubted
legitimacy of Mary as a descendant of David and the adoption of Jesus
by Joseph, a scion of another branch of the same great family. Luke
gives a sentence, all luminous, but first puzzling: ‘_Jesus himself
began to be about thirty years of age, being, as was supposed, the son
of Joseph, which was the son of Heli._’ ‘Ah, as was _supposed!_’ sneers
the infidel. ‘As was _supposed!_ SUPPOSED!!’ hatefully shouts some
insinuating, ignorant Jews! But now let us fill out, naturally, Luke’s
statement, ‘as was supposed, the son of Joseph, but in reality the son
of Heli.’ But here it may be asked, was Jesus the son of Heli? It is,
I answer, not infrequently in the Scriptures that a grandson is called
a son. Jesus was probably the grandson of Heli. It was a common custom
of the Jews, except in cases of especial necessity, not to record the
names of women in tracing lines of descent. Men kept the books, and it
had become a habit with the lords of creation to thrust woman into the
background. Mary was too insignificant a person, socially considered, in
her time, to be registered in her own name in the hereditary charters.
Joseph was put in her stead, as her representative. There was not any
supposition about the descent of Mary, but these scribes, who had charge
of the books, thought it were more creditable to the male sex to record
Joseph as the father of Jesus, and, by a little fiction, suppose him to
have descended through the former from Heli, than to say Mary descended
from Heli and Jesus descended from Mary. The Romans encouraged this,
and also the politicians. Men were the only ones to fight or pay taxes,
and, as political factors, were strictly watched by those in authority.
Luke, in reality, gives Mary’s line. He was scholarly and accurate,
besides that a physician, and we judge by all experience that there is
that in the profession of medicine which makes its followers tender
toward all suffering, consequently especially tender to women, the
largest inheritors of the pains that beset our race. Doctor Luke, like
those of his fraternity, by an act of graceful justice, in the spirit of
Christianity which is essentially humane, just, and courtly, accorded
gladly the woman her place. But the ‘_doomsday books_’ of the Jews,
containing their family trees or genealogies, perished with the perishing
of the Jewish nation. Those records had done their work; it was time for
them to go. They had become by misuse agencies of evil. They stood long
enough to demonstrate that God works through cycles vastly wide, and that
His definite promise made to Adam, Abraham and many of their successors,
had finally been fulfilled, at the end of thousands of years, with a
miraculous explicitness. The records disappeared after Christ came, and
herein was a providence saying to the watchers: ‘He is come. No need
further of the patents of His ancestry to aid your watching.’ More than
that, they being gone, no other could arise claiming to be Shiloh, with
hope of convincing any by appeal to proof from the records of ancestry.
“Shiloh and his white kingdom have come. It is ruling the earth; not
in memories of its mighty dead, but by its regal, potent virtues and
charities. The battering rams of Titus destroyed wall and Holy Temple,
but thus was let in new dawn. Above the storm of that awful conflict the
spiritual may discern in living letters the mightly words of God which
dispelled disordering darkness from the universe at the beginning: ‘_Let
there be light_,’ and, indeed, ‘light was.’ The obliterated records of
Jewish ancestral lines, on which alone many a worthless child of Abraham
based his claims to superiority, his right to despise and neglect his
fellow men, his justification to tyrannize, and finally his hope of favor
with God, ceased to present their sturdy barriers to the entering in of a
better hope. Then came in the beginning of this new era; now the patent
of nobility is noble character; this is the time to be marked by an
universal recognition of universal brotherhood in a kingdom where there
is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, male nor female. A kingdom
where righteousness, impartial justice, liberty, equality, purity and
humanity are to be the regnant potencies. In this kingdom, how fittingly,
Christ stands as the king and ideal of man, and how fittingly his mother
supplements his sway by being presented herself to all womankind as a
queenly ideal. Let him or her dispute her title, who can surely say
the earth, in this redemption period, needs no such sublime epitome of
womanly virtue and worthfulness.
“My words are ended for to-day, assembled men and women. Some of these
things spoken may seem like deep sayings, but I leave them to find their
lodgment in your hearts and minds. I trust them, knowing that Truth has a
sword which cuts her way, each sweep of that sword making light.”