endowed with our humanity. A King, this, from the first moment of His conception — aye, the King of kings, in whose power it was to say even of whom and how and when and where He should be born. For the first and last time in the history of the universe a child chooses His Mother, and the creature gives life to the Creator. Where now is the philosophic axiom " no one gives what he has not "? Here the ocean rises from a little fountain, and the sun receives its light from a tiny star, — God born of a Virgin! Though the light goes out from it, the sun's lustre remains undimmed; a wondrous plant is Mary, sprung from the root of Jesse which bore its precious fruit, indeed, but never shed its virginal blossoms. In her, once again, the newly created earth, unploughed, unsown, sent forth at the command of God the herb and tree. God born of the humblest of God's creatures, in a manger of a stable, of a village whose very obscurity was a byword and a reproach! Born in the midst of winter, without means and without friends — and at a time when His spiritual and temporal enemies had reached the zenith of their power! Surely no one but a God could have afforded to undertake and accomplish in the face of such obstacles, the mission of the Saviour. Ah! how short-sighted we are and how little conformed to the spirit of Christ! Give me but the power to choose, and I would elect to have been born of a royal queen, heir to unlimited power, surrounded with every comfort and luxury; my virtues glorified, my very faults interpreted as virtues by
