the Child there, saying: “I believe in Jesus Christ, His (the Almighty Father’s) only Son, our Lord.”
The love of God. The Eternal Son of God became Man, and hid His Omnipotence and Majesty under the form of a poor, helpless child. He, the Lord, took the form of a servant, and became like to us in all things, sin only excepted. Why did He become Man? Why did He suffer and die? Why did He wish to redeem us? It was because He loved us with an infinite and divine love. “God so loved the world, as to give His only-begotten Son &c.” (John 3, 16). “Let us thereforelove God, because God first loved us” (1 John 4, 19).
Christmas. According to tradition our Lord was born in the night between the 24th and 25th of December. Christmas, or the Nativity of our Lord, is therefore kept on the 25th of December, and on this great Feast three Masses may be said by each priest.
The sufferings of Jesus began with His Birth. The Son of God became Man to suffer for us, to make satisfaction for our sins, and to redeem us from sin and hell. All His life He suffered unspeakably for us, and His sufferings began with His Birth. He came into the world in a state of the utmost poverty and humility. For the Son of God to take to Himself human nature at all would have been an infinite humiliation, even had He been born in a royal palace, and laid at His Birth on silken cushions, in a golden cradle. But He wished to humble Himself still more, and therefore was born into the world in a poor stable, and laid in the rudest of cribs. The Lord of the universe, the son of David, of whose kingdom there was to be no end, could find no home in the. city of David I Shut out from the dwellings of man, rejected by human society, He was driven to find a refuge among the beasts, and, wrapped in the coarsest of swathing bands, was laid in a manger belonging to the shepherds. “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head” (Luke 9, 58). He had no comfortable little bed, no soft, w'arm pillow. His tender body lay on the hard straw, in a narrow crib, and was exposed to the damp, raw winter-air. A piece of wood at His Birth, and a piece of wood at His Death, that was all that Jesus received from this world! Truly the Divine Infant was poorer than the poorest child! Our Lord chose for Himself this extreme poverty and humility to make satisfaction even from His Birth for our many sins of pride, for our concupiscence of the eyes and of the flesh, and to give to us an example of humility, self-denial and mortification. Man fell by pride, desiring what was impossible, namely to be as God, and his fall was so deep that he fell into the bondage of Satan and the concupiscence of the eyes and of the flesh, and into sins and crimes of the basest description. In order to free us from sin and hell, God the Son became Man, and was like to us in all things, sin only excepted, so that we might become once more the children of God. He humbled Himself that we might be exalted. He became poor that
