those clear-eyed and immortal spirits who for unnumbered ages have
known His power, His holiness, His benignity to unfallen creatures,
but now experience the wonder which more properly belongs to more
limited intelligences, when they behold that depth of condescending
Love stooping to be born. Even they think more loftily of God, and
more of man's possibilities and worth, when they cluster round the
manger, and see who lies there.

'On earth peace.' The song drops from the contemplation of the
heavenly consequences to celebrate the results on earth, and gathers
them all into one pregnant word, 'Peace.' What a scene of strife,
discord, and unrest earth must seem to those calm spirits! And how
vain and petty the struggles must look, like the bustle of an ant-hill!
Christ's work is to bring peace into all human relations, those with
God, with men, with circumstances, and to calm the discords of souls
at war with themselves. Every one of these relations is marred by sin,
and nothing less thorough than a power which removes it can rectify
them. That birth was the coming into humanity of Him who brings peace
with God, with ourselves, with one another. Shame on Christendom that
nineteen centuries have passed, and men yet think the cessation of
war is only a 'pious imagination'! The ringing music of that angel
chant has died away, but its promise abides.

The symmetry of the song is best preserved, as I humbly venture to
think, by the old reading as in the Authorised Version. The other,
represented by the Revised Version, seems to make the second clause
drag somewhat, with two designations of the region of peace. The
Incarnation brings God's 'good will' to dwell among men. In Christ,
God is well pleased; and from Him incarnate, streams of divine
complacent love pour out to freshen and fertilise the earth.