We can imagine one subject of the conversation between her and Joseph on the way. Their poverty and obscurity had hidden from public notice the fact of their lineage, so direct from David. But all the Jews were wont to preserve with great care everything pertaining to their genealogies, and it was especially the case with those whose certainty of Davidic descent gave them ground for hoping that the Messiah would appear in their own line. We may believe that Joseph took with him a copy of the official family records, those that Matthew and Luke have preserved for us, and that he pleased himself and Mary along the toilsome way with the thought that now their specially honorable descent would have to be in some measure publicly recognized. Cæsar Augustus himself had not so good a patent of nobility as had they. Although the dark shadow of that monarch was about to fall, by reason of this decree for enrollment, across the very beginning of the holy Child’s life, they were afterward to realize that God’s providence had been leading them and had caused human government to become an involuntary agent for bringing about the fulfillment of the prophecy that the Messiah should be born in Bethlehem. Now who was this Cæsar Augustus, that is assumed to have had so great authority in the whole world that at his bidding a registration had to be taken in every part of it? He was no less than the first sole master of Rome’s united empire, one of the most conspicuous figures in the history of the human race. He had ascended the throne as the climax of a series of very startling and tragic events. Julius Cæsar,--that man so wonderful alike for military genius, political sagacity, and literary skill, to whom first the Roman Senate gave the imposing title of _Imperator_, and who, if he had lived longer, would probably have become all that this title later grew to mean,--had been assassinated by a group of conspirators at Rome in the year 44 before the beginning of the Christian era. These assassins claimed that they were doing a great service to the state by delivering it from the schemes of so ambitious a man; but none can deny that jealousy was among the motives that impelled them to commit the bloody deed, which took place in the building in the Campus Martius where the Senate that year convened, adjoining the Theater of Pompey, and we are told that it was at the feet of great Pompey’s statue that Cæsar fell. Mark Antony, who had been his colleague in the consulship and in the control of the army, dramatically pronounced a funeral oration after Cæsar’s death from the _rostra_ in the Forum and then endeavored to make himself the successor to Cæsar’s remarkable power and popularity. But just then a new and strong competitor for the military and political leadership appeared in the person of a young man only nineteen years of age, who is the subject of this sketch.