In a land where the customs of the people never change, all the incidents of the story of the birth of the Savior are confirmed by modern usage. It is no evidence of the poverty of Joseph and Mary that they failed to obtain lodgings in the inn, as the decree of Augustus had called home all citizens belonging to the town, which, being small, was filled to overflowing; nor is it proof of the humbleness of the holy family that they were compelled to lodge in the stable, as to this day, both in Bethlehem and in other Syrian cities, kitchen, parlor, and stable are frequently under the same roof, and often without a partition between them. In going from Jerusalem to Nablous, I stopped with a Christian at Beeroth, near Bethel. His dwelling was a one-story house. Within was a raised platform not two feet high, on which was arranged the furniture of his home; at the foot of the platform was a space four feet wide, and extending the whole depth of the building, which was the stable, and in one corner stood his ass. And in a neighboring house a woman was kneading dough on the platform, and a little girl was holding an infant, and two feet from them stood the ass, with his elongated head thrust into a stone manger excavated in the solid rock. This order of domestic architecture throws light upon the apparent discrepancies of Matthew and Luke. The former mentions a house in connection with our Lord’s birth;[331] the latter a manger, thereby supposing a stable.[332] But the historians refer to two distinct events――St. Luke, to the night of the Savior’s birth; St. Matthew, to the visit of the Magi, which occurred some time later. Mary and her son may then have found room in the inn; or, if the visit of the wise men was simultaneous with that of the shepherds, St. Matthew alludes to a house with a stable under the same roof, and the entrance to which was through the main door of the dwelling. Bethlehem may be viewed with a pleasing confidence as the city where “God was manifested in the flesh,” and that from a place so humble influences have gone forth affecting the present condition and future hopes of the entire race. Since that wondrous child was born, empires have passed away and generations have descended to the grave. Of that renowned empire, whose proud emperor summoned Mary to perform a journey of eighty miles in the rains of December, not a fragment remains; and of the Herods who waylaid his infancy and persecuted his manhood, not a descendant reigns over an inch of the broad earth. But the kingdom of Christ endures, his subjects people both hemispheres, and the song of the Bethlehem songsters is yet to be the anthem of a redeemed world.