Again, when we are the recipients of gifts, we examine them, we give them careful scrutiny, we desire to know: What is that which we have received? Apply that to God's Christmas gift. What is it? He tells us: "Unto you is born this day a Savior, which is Christ, the Lord." Not a star, not a world, not any created thing, but Christ, the Lord. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail th' incarnate Deity. Pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel. O the mystery, the impenetrable mystery of the gift! As you sit down and meditate upon it, as you reflect and gaze upon that divine Child, reason is confounded, thought is pushed to confusion, faith stands in profound contemplation on the brink of this sea, too deep for human intelligence to fathom, too broad for man's mind to encircle, and yet, let us not stagger at the wonderful fact. We are standing to-day, my beloved, in the presence of the greatest miracle of time. We behold here no ordinary child. It's Deity in humanity, Divinity in infancy. In this little body is bound up God's immensity, in this Babe's weakness is enclosed heaven's almightiness. This child resting at His mother's breast (who can grasp it?) is the Lord of glory, the worshipful Creator of the universe, God blest forevermore. Such is the nature of the gift--"unspeakable," as the Apostle declares. Again, we consider the purpose of the gift. There are every variety and quality of gifts bestowed at this season: ornamental ones, serving the purpose of decoration and embellishment, beautiful for the eye to behold; useful ones, administering to the necessity and the comforts of their recipients. How about God's Christmas gift? Ah! for human lips to speak out its value. Again we lisp, "Unspeakable." What illustrations might I employ? You lift up your eyes and encounter the bright rays of the sun; what would this world be without the light and warmth that comes from its radiant face? You feel the drops of rain falling in gentle showers; what would the soil be without these rivulets and streams that fructify its acres? Yet all such illustrations are too improper to express what this world would spiritually be without Christ. Said the angel: "Unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior." In that word you have the key of Christmas and the purpose of God's Christmas gift. "A Savior"--what a chapter that opens before us! Back to the days of Paradise does it conduct us, when man was dwelling in innocence, fell and falling, carrying himself and all his posterity to universal and eternal destruction. Sin, that most terrible of all evils upon the soul, thorns and thistles upon the ground, misery and sickness and death upon the body, the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain,--this was the sorry consequence, and this is the sad, sad story as it is read in the history of every man's life and of the world at large. And whence was deliverance to come? From