It was when Herod was king at Jerusalem in this way,--fawning upon the favor of Octavian and fearing to incur that monarch’s displeasure,--that Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. The Messiah, whom prophets had foretold and whom the Jews were longing for, made His advent in the humblest way. The Prince of Peace came as a little child into a world of awful selfishness and cruelty and conflict. Herod must have died not long after that event. The sufferings of his final illness are thought to have exasperated his anxiety and cruelty and perhaps were among the causes which led to his ordering the slaughter, as described by Matthew, of the few young male infants in the village of Bethlehem, the number not being large enough to make the Jewish historian Josephus record the incident alongside of Herod’s other and more extensive iniquities. While that ruler alienated the affections of the Jews, yet he professed to be a Jew in religion and, with scrupulous care, rebuilt the temple at Jerusalem, which temple continued to stand during the ministry of Jesus and of the Apostles. After the death of Herod there was made among his sons a distribution of the provinces of Palestine by the emperor Octavian. It was because of fear of one of these sons, Archelaus, who ruled in Judea, that Joseph and Mary, returning with the young child from Egypt, did not go to Bethlehem, but turned aside and went to Nazareth in Galilee. Sextus, the son of Pompey, who had commanded a piratical fleet on the Mediterranean, intercepting ships bound from Alexandria to Italy, was conquered by the forces of Octavian and was slain. The reputed son of Julius Cæsar and Cleopatra, Cæsarion by name, was also put to death. Octavian was now made _Imperator_, and Censor of the Empire for life. This does not mean that all of the forms of a republic were at once destroyed, but that the government was administered in the spirit of an absolute monarchy. Octavian retained the family name of Cæsar, which was also assumed by his successors, as an official designation, even when they belonged to other lines of descent; just as are the modern titles of “Kaiser” in Germany and “Czar” in Russia, which are, indeed, derived from the Roman name.