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the light had come, and the glory of the Lord had risen on us. Our conversion had been prophesied but utterly lost sight of, as witness the astonishment of the Apostles when the Holy Ghost descended on the newly-baptized Gentiles. But the Lord is God of Jew and Gentile both. That all flesh should see the salvation of God was the object of His coming. But first He came unto His own, but immediately on finding the Jewish homes and hearts of Bethlehem closed to Him, He summoned the Gentile kings to do Him homage. The star that led them was the first tiny ray to penetrate the gloom of paganism. Its apparition was the first skirmish between the powers of light and darkness, of faith and the world. The light was first vouchsafed to kings, not because kings are the primal objects of divine solicitude or readiest to follow God's leadings, but because the order of Providence is that the higher angels should illumine the lower, and the lower angels man through the highest to the lowest. But alas! the Father's will is not always done on earth as it is in heaven, and hence, notwithstanding the Magi's prompt response, it was not until three centuries later, when the apparition of the cross led Constantine and his forces to victory, that the Gentile kings turned to the new Jerusalem and walked in the brightness of its rising. Meantime, the Lord's glory had shone on the Apostles, and through them as through a many-sided prism, the light had been diffused among the nations. The Church in turn became the light of the world, and people flocked to