II. ON CHRISTMAS-DAY.* 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'--S. LUKE, II. 14. N all the Christian year, in all the secular year, there is not a day which has gained the heartiness of universal welcome, like the kindly Christmas. It was our Blessed Redeemer's Death that consummated His great atonement; and of that : Death we know the very day it was on the seventh of April Christ died. Yet Good Friday has but a slight recognition, when compared with Christmas. It is on our Blessed Redeemer's Resurrection that all our hopes depend: If He were not risen, Christian * Town Church, St Andrews: 1872. · people are of all most deluded. Yet though Easterday be chief in the Church's Kalendar, and though it come in the hopeful Spring with the first green leaves, when the most care-worn know some fitful wakingup of the old light-heartedness, it never has taken such hold of the common mind of our race as has the Sacred Festival that comes in the deadest days of the drear December, when in the wild winter-time the heaven-born Child lay meanly-wrapt in the rude manger when those linked by blood, and early remembrances of the same fireside, but parted the long year through by the estranging necessities of life, strive to meet again, as in childhood, together: and all the innocent mirth, the revived associations, the kindly affection, are hallowed by the environing presence of the Birth-day of the Blessed Redeemer. : It is pleasant to think that this great Festival of our holy religion, recalling the solemn fact of the Nativity and Incarnation, is so linked and twined with human and domestic affection: pleasant to think, that by common consent of all men, everything kindly, charitable, cheerful, and hopeful, goes so congenially with the thought of Christ. I do not care that the twenty-fifth of December is not really the great Birthday, nor that no one knows when that day does actually fall. Enough that this day has been kept as such for sixteen hundred years. Enough that when Christmas-time comes back, with all the sacred remembrances it brings with it of redeeming love and of free salvation,-of God's mysterious and incommunicable attributes taken into union with humanity, and brought near to each of us by Him who is Emmanuel, God with us,-enough that the meetings together of divided families under the old roof-tree where the aged parents yet linger, or elsewhere after parents are gone;-the long-looked-for holiday season of the boys and girls;—the breathingspace of rest in the life of the hardest workers ;-the |