The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1921. CHRISTMAS

New Zealand Tablet, 22 December 1921, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1921. CHRISTMAS

For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun, And they lay their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done. -\ Here we have battle and blazing eyes, And chance and honor and high surprise, But our homes are under miraculous skies Where the Yule Tale was begun.

♦ HRISTMAS, with its innumerable tender memories, with its hallowed associations, with its promise of peace and its benedictions for all men of good will, awakes, even in a land where home life is almost destroyed, yearnings for homes that are lost, loneliness for homes that are left behind, and sighs for the home to which we may all aspire when the day is done and the battle of life hushed for ever. In hearts wherein faith is cold the action of grace is palpable again; souls that habitually walk with God are drawn nearer to Him than before the miracles that attended the first of all Christmases reach out to us once more, though it be faintly and almost imperceptibly like the distant outer circles of the ripples caused on a pond. The presence of the Prince of Peace produces a momentary lull even* in our warring world and the beat of the angels’ wings drifts down the breezes. Hopefully, eagerly, people who hoped but little all the past year, raise their heads again at the sound of the'bells and strain to catch a far-flung echo of that deathless chorus that was first heard among the silent hills of Judea nearly two thousand years agq now: » Gloria in excelsis Deo , et in terra pax hominibus honae " voluntatis. What miracles are contained in the sublime and simple narrative of the Nativity! The Son of God becomes man He is conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary; the humanly irreconcilable honors of maternity and virginity are bestowed on the Mother of Christ; a daughter of Eve is truly the Mother of God; the Eternal Godhead and the pure Jewish maiden can each say of the Infant: This is my Son; and the Child that is born is true God and true Man.at the same time. All these wonders are summed up in the Incarnation, that stupendous mystery whereby the Son of God Himself was placed among the human family,

to redeem it, to ennoble it, to sanctify it, and, in oneluminous divine lesson, to teach, it how-to. live and howto die.; There we'have the foundation on/which, the /:> brotherhood of man rests unassailably there we have She '-. unchanging motive of charity there we have the key.;,. : to the jewel of chastity ; the true patent of our nobility; \ the convincing proof of our dignity the root of all . / manliness, or of virtue, for they mean the same thing ; V in the end. For all this and for unspeakably more the?: |1 Incarnation stands and shall stand to the end of time. - In all this we renew our faith when we are moved by ; * the grace of the season of Christmas to repeat, with < the simplicity and fervor of our youth "' _ I believe in Jesus Christ, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary. For two thousand years the reign of Christ in the hearts of Christians has endured. He has seen Rome decay 8 and the sceptre of power pass in turn from empire to empire. Around His Throne in the Church, wars have raged and men and nations have spent themselves in blind fury, -driven by the evil spirit to their own destruction. His banner has advanced to all the outposts of the world, and the foes that opposed it have gone ' down before it in a series of complete if bloodless defeats. No huge armies carried it forward; no frowning fleets bore it overseas. Nay, armies and fleets were arrayed against it, and in spite of them it was planted and guarded 'by the weak and the humble and the persecuted. Like the obelisk raised now above the , Circus of Nero, the banner of Christ, floats throughout the world over the scenes of persecution and proclaims its victory in the same words: Christ reigns, Christ conquers, Christ commands, may Christ defend Bis people from all harm! Thrones of the earth have their hour; wars rage and are forgotten > the men who seem drunk with pride and power to-day are but as the snows of yester-year tomorrow. But Christ is with us, one of our human family, our brother, just as He was during the thirty odd years that followed the first Christmas Day, upon which He was born in the stable of Bethlehem. He *""" conquers and He reigns; and those among us who will hearken to Him and learn of Him will conquer with Him and will reign with Him too. His Kingdom on V earth endureth, and the faithful within it shall never be separated from Him; whatever their trials here, whatever their wrongs and their sufferings, they 1 are ever supported and sustained by the knowledge that when the day is done they will find Him waiting for them in their home under miraclous skies, where wars and troubles will be no more and the furious voices of *- their persecutors will not be heard; for Siere His law' and rule, which are one with the Divine Will, ensure the peace and the blessedness which men would enjoy also in this life did they not try to put their own desires and their own ends before the law of God. And only when they do His will; only when they learn the lessons of humility and chastity and reverence and obedience and self-denial that He taught us in Bethlehem, will all the noise and all the talk of a world-wide reconstruction come to bear fruit. There will be joy and brotherhood when men realise that the song of the angels bore and always will bear/a conditional promise,V~:' and that if they are not men of good-will the peace is not for them. May Christmas , bring us all to the ■ Crib where on our knees we can learn aright the lesson V * that alone will save the world and unite and reform V mankind. ,-

THE “NEW YORK TIMES”

The Citizen, Milwaukee, U.S.A., says:—The New York limes recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of Mr Adolph Ochs ownership thereof. And the New York Nation sent the following bouquet: “No journal has exceeded it (the Times) in disseminating falsehoods, misrepresentation and half-truths during the unparalleled era of wholesale lying in which the world has lived since 1914.” This of the journal so frequently quoted as-an authority in cables to iNew Zealand. - : v-r,