eternal birth is celebrated last, with brilliant pomp and splendor and elaborate music as worthy as may be of the Divinity. St. John, in the first chapter of his Gospel, commemorates all three, saying: " In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was made flesh; and we saw His glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."
Brethren, so ineffable is the birth of the Word of God in the bosom of the Divinity, that even Isaias stands aghast and exclaims: "Who shall declare His generation? " A fitter subject for angels' meditation than for human speech. That a son should be equal in all things to his father; that a father should communicate to his son his entire nature and yet lose nothing thereby; that a son should be born without a mother; that an infinitely perfect being should be the product of a single intellectual act; these are truths indeed, but beyond human ken — discernible only with the eye of faith. In the birth of Venus from the waves, or of armed Minerva from Jupiter's head, we find the pagan straining after the truth — the rise of the all-beautiful from the illimitable Divinity and the birth of a God from a God. St. Paul's address to the Hebrews (chap, i.) speaks of the Word as: "The brightness of His Father's glory and the figure of His substance." That is to say " as the light from the sun, so the Word from the Father." Proceeding by a continuous process of generation from an undivided source, coexistent therewith, emanating from it, but leaving behind no void, and everywhere bearing and
