Christmas was drawing near, with many of the old pagan festivities, as well as those of the Christian Church, gathered around the season. But to the Irish captives it brought no festive home gatherings—this their first Christian Christmas, their first homeless New Year. To them, therefore, all that was festive in the season was concentrated entirely in the great Festival of the Nativity. Their home was in the home of the Holy Childhood of the Child Jesus and the Mother Mary. The great stately basilicas were as a family hearth to these fatherless and motherless exiles, and the words of Bishop Leo on the Incarnation were as a father’s welcome to them. “You know well, dilectissimi,” Leo said, “and have frequently heard the things which belong to the sacred observance of this day’s solemnity. But as this visible light affords pleasure to uninjured eyes, so do sound hearts receive perpetual joy from the Nativity of the Saviour. Wherefore we must never be silent, though we cannot set it forth as it deserves.”[3] Then he spoke of “the general Confession common to all, whereby the whole body of the faithful say they believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, Who was born of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary; by which three clauses,” he said, “the engines of attack of all the heretics are shattered.”[4] And Ethne and Baithene, who knew the Confession well, although they knew little of the heretics, felt warm and safe as birds in their own nest within the sacred walls, which kept them safe from all these battering-rams. Again Leo said— “Lowliness was taken up by Majesty, weakness by Power, mortality by Eternity; and in order to pay the debt of our corruption, the inviolable nature was united to that which could suffer. “In the entire and perfect nature of very man was born the very God; whole, in what was His; whole, in what was ours. By _ours_ we mean what the Creator formed in us at the beginning, and what He assumed in order to restore. For of that which the demon brought, which man, by him deceived, admitted, there was not a trace in the Saviour; and the fact that He took on Himself our infirmities did not make Him partaker of our transgressions. He took on Him the form of a servant, of a slave” (at these words Ethne gently touched her brother’s arm), “without the defilement of sin, enlarging the human and not diminishing the Divine; for that emptying of Himself whereby the Invisible made Himself visible, and the Creator of all things willed to be one among mortals, was the stooping of compassion, not the failure of power.