On the day of the Nativity, the Infant Brother of Humanity was born and was laid in a manger, there being no room for his human mother at the inn. But wherever he lay—there, through the mystery of his kinship, was the shining Gateway of Heaven. That translucent Light, from the moment of its appearance, intensified, as by opposite polarity, the baleful lights from all unholy fires in human breasts. Herod was first aroused to the Slaughter of the Innocents, and he has had his successors in every age during the growth of Christendom.
As the Light of the World has expanded these nineteen centuries, shining in the hearts of men, ever awakening new ideas of Truth, Justice, and Mercy, against every fresh gleam, promising wider horizons of human Love and Sympathy, have been arrayed the brutish hosts, with Hatred and Murder in their hardened hearts. For the present generation has been reserved the vision of the very Armageddon of this Conflict, in which the world is divided against itself. The Powers precipitating it inaugurated it and have in its whole course attended it with every conceivable form of atrocity and outrage against noncombatants—innocent men. women, and children. But that Heavenly Light which shone in the stable at Bethlehem can never be put out!
HENRY MILLS ALDEN.
