is born on earth!! When such is the goodness of God towards us, what. I ask, what should we not do to testify our obedience to his will? With what promptitude and alacrity should we not love, embrace, and perform all the duties of Christian humility? The faithful should also know the salutary lessons which Christ teaches at his birth, before he opens his divine lips; he is born in poverty, he is born a stranger under a roof not his own, he is born in a lonely crib he is born in the depth of winter! These circumstances, which attend the birth of the man-God, are thus recorded by St. Luke: " And it came to pass, that, when they were there, her days were accomplished that she should be delivered, and she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn." [1] Could the Evangelist comprehend under more humble terms the majesty and glory that filled the heavens and the earth? He does not say, there was no room in the inn, but " there was no room for him who says: mine is the earth and the fulness thereof;" [2] and this destitution of the man-God another Evangelist records in these words; " He came unto his own, and his own received him not." [3]
When the faithful have placed these things before their eyes, let them also reflect, that God condescended to assume the lowliness and frailty of our flesh in order to exalt man to the highest degree of dignity; for this single reflection alone supplies sufficient proof of the exalted dignity of man conferred on him by the divine bounty that he who is true and perfect God vouchsafed to become man; so that we may now glory that the Son of God is bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, a privilege not given to angels, " for no where," says the apostle, "doth he take hold of the angels: but of the seed of Abraham he taketh hold." [4]
We must also take care, that these singular blessings rise not in judgment against us; that, as at Bethlehem, the place of his nativity, he was denied a dwelling; so also, now that he is no life. longer born in human flesh, he be not denied a dwelling in our hearts, in which he may be spiritually born: for, through an earnest desire for our salvation, this is the object of his most anxious solicitude. As then, by the power of the Holy Ghost, and in a manner superior to the order of nature, he was made man and was born, was holy and even holiness itself; so does it become our duty " to be born, not of blood nor of the will of flesh, but of God;" [5] to walk, as new creatures in newness of spirit: [6] and to preserve that holiness and purity of soul that be come men regenerated by the Spirit of God. [7] Thus shall we reflect some faint image of the holy conception and nativity of the Son of God, which are the objects of our firm faith, and believing which we revere and adore "in a mystery, wisdom of God which was hidden." [8]
