of dim, confused suspicion in their minds that it was wrong and cruel
to treat human beings like brute beasts, which made them set up that
strange old custom of letting their slaves play at being free once
every Christmas-tide.

But if on this same day, 1851 years ago, instead of being in the
great city of Rome, we had been in the little village of Bethlehem in
Judaea, we might have seen a sight stranger still; a sight which we
could not have fancied had anything to do with that merrymaking of
the slaves at Rome, and yet which had everything to do with it.

We should have seen, in a mean stable, among the oxen and the asses,
a poor maiden, with her newborn baby laid in the manger, for want of
any better cradle, and by her her husband, a poor carpenter, whom all
men thought to be the father of her child. . . . There, in the
stable, amid the straw, through the cold winter days and nights, in
want of many a comfort which the poorest woman, and the poorest
woman's child would need, they stayed there, that young maiden and
her newborn babe. That young maiden was the Blessed Virgin Mary, and
that poor baby was the Son of God. The Son of God, in whose likeness
all men were made at the beginning; the Son of God, who had been
ruling the whole world all along; who brought the Jews out of
slavery, a thousand years before, and destroyed their cruel tyrants
in the Red Sea; the Son of God, who had been all along punishing
cruel tyrants and oppressors, and helping the poor out of misery,
whenever they called on Him. The Light which lightens every man who
comes into the world, was that poor babe. It was He who gives men
reason, and conscience, and a tender heart, and delight in what is
good, and shame and uneasiness of mind when they do wrong. It was He
who had been stirring up, year by year, in those cruel Romans'