should continue to exhibit the wonder of Christ's Incarnation, and show
forth God clothed with man.

The life of Jesus divides itself quite naturally into several distinct
periods, each having its own special characteristics and peculiar history.
There is His birth and infancy; His childhood; His youth; His manhood; His
perfected or completed life following Calvary and the Resurrection; and,
may we not say, His eternal glory, upon which a few of His disciples saw
Him begin to enter in the transcending splendour of the Ascension.

Every one of these phases or sections of His wonderful experience of earth
has its continuing lessons for us. All speak aloud to us of His purposes
and plans, and reveal to us the power and force of His inner life in the
outward or public appearances and acts which belong to each. God has
hidden many things from us--mysteries of nature, of grace, of eternity;
but this mystery of God's relations to men, He has exhausted His resources
in order to make plain. Before all else the life of Jesus is a revelation
of the mind and methods, the principles and the practices of God, as they
ought to appear, and as they ought to work out, amid the surroundings and
limitations of humanity.

It is to the beginnings of that life to which our thoughts turn at this
Christmas season. We dwell with affection on the oft-depicted picture, and
repeat the oft-repeated words, and join in the old, old Hallelujahs of the
shepherds with something of the zest and freshness of a first love. The
story is so unlike all others, and touches with such unerring potency
chords in the human soul which call it to a higher and nobler life, that,
no matter who gazes upon the Babe of Bethlehem, he feels a kinship with
all the world in hailing the Desire of all Nations. The manger, the silent
companions of the stable, the swaddling clothes--what a touch of human