hearts, the feeling that there was something wrong in grinding down
their slaves, and put into their minds the notion of giving them
their Christmas rest and freedom. He had been keeping up that good
old custom for a witness and a warning that all men were equal in His
sight; that all men had a right to liberty of speech and conscience;
a right to some fair share in the good things of the earth, which God
had given to all men freely to enjoy. But those old Romans would not
take the warning. They kept up the custom, but they shut their eyes
to the lesson of it. They went on conquering and oppressing all the
nations of the earth, and making them their slaves. And now He was
come--He Himself, the true Lord of the earth, the true pattern of
men. He was come to show men to whom this world belonged: He was
come to show men in what true power, true nobleness consisted--not in
making others minister to us, but in ministering to them: He was
come to set a pattern of what a man should be; He was the Son of Man--
THE MAN of all men--and therefore He had come with good news to all
poor slaves, and neglected, hard-worked creatures: He had come to
tell them that He cared for them; that He could and would deliver
them; that they were God's children, and His brothers, just as much
as their Roman masters; and that He was going to bring a terrible
time upon the earth--"days of the Son of Man," when He would judge
all men, and show who were true men and who were not--such a time as
had never been before, or would be again; when that great Roman
empire, in spite of all its armies, and its cunning, and its riches,
plundered from every nation under heaven, would crumble away and
perish shamefully and miserably off the face of the earth, before
tribes of poor, untaught, savage men, the brothers and countrymen of
those very slaves whom the Romans fancied were so much below them,
that they had a right to treat them like the beasts which perish.