Some other circumstances of the relation of Luke presents new difficulties. He speaks of a _taxing_ (enumeration) by order of Caesar Augustus:--a fact of which no mention is made by any historian, Jewish or profane. We are also astonished to find the son of God born in poverty, having no other asylum than a stable, and no other cradle than a manger; and at the tenderest age, in a rigorous season, exposed to miseries without number.
It is true, our theologists have found a way to answer all these difficulties. They maintain, that a just God wishing to appease himself, destined his innocent son to afflictions, in order to have a motive for pardoning the guilty human race, which had become hateful to him through Adam's transgression, in which, however, his decendants had no share. By an act of justice, whereof the mind of man can form no idea, a God whose essence renders him incapable of committing sin, is loaded with the iniquities of man, and must expiate them in order to disarm the indignation of a father he has not offended! Such are the inconceivable principles which serve for the basis of the Christian theology.
Our doctors add--It was the will of God that the birth of his son should be accompanied with the same accidents as that of other men, to console the latter for the misfortunes attendent on their existence. Man, say they, is guilty before he is born, because all children are bound to pay the debts of their fathers: thus man suffers justly as a sinner himself, and as charged with the sin of his first father.--Granting this, what more consolatory than seeing a God, innocence and holiness itself, suffering in a stable all the evils attached to indigence! That consolation would have been wanting, if God had ordained that his son should be born in splendor, and with an abundance of the comforts of life. If the innocent Jesus had not suffered, mankind, incapable of extinguishing a debt contracted by Adam, would have been forever excluded from paradise. The painful journey Mary was obliged to undertake in such critical circumstances, had been foreseen by Eternal wisdom, which had resolved that Jesus should be born at Bethlehem and not at Nazareth. It was necessary--having been foretold, it behoved to be accomplished.