You know I must antedate my letters for special days. I am actually writing this sentence on the second December, at ten in the morning, with the feeblest possible gleam of sun on my paper; and for the last three weeks the days have been one long drift of ragged gloom, with only sometimes five minutes' gleam of the glory of God, between the gusts, which no one regarded. I am taking the name of God in vain, you think? No, my religious friends, not I. For completed forty years, I have been striving to consider the blue heavens, the work of His fingers, and the moon and the stars which He hath ordained: but you have left me nothing now to consider here at Denmark Hill, but these black heavens, the work of your fingers, and the blotting of moon and stars which you have ordained; you,--taking the name of God in vain every Sunday, and His work and His mercy in vain all the week through. "You have nothing to do with it--you are very sorry for it--and Baron Liebig says that the power of England is coal?" You have everything to do with it. Were you not told to come out and be separate from all evil? You take whatever advantage you can of the evil work and gain of this world, and yet expect the people you share with, to be damned, out of your way, in the next. If you would begin by putting them out of your way here, you would perhaps carry some of them with you there. But return to your night vision, and explain to me, if not what the angel was like, at least what you understand him to have said,--he, and those with him. With his own lips he told the shepherds there was born a Saviour for them; but more was to be told: "And suddenly there was with him a multitude of the heavenly host." People generally think that this verse means only that after one angel had spoken, there came more to sing, in the manner of a chorus; but it means far another thing than that. If you look back to Genesis you find creation summed thus:--"So the heavens and earth were finished, and all the host of them." Whatever living powers of any order, great or small, were to inhabit either, are included in the word. The host of earth includes the ants and the worms of it; the host of heaven includes,--we know not what;--how should we?--the creatures that are in the stars which we cannot count,--in the space which we cannot imagine; some of them so little and so low that they can become flying poursuivants to this grain of sand we live on; others having missions, doubtless, to larger grains of sand, and wiser creatures on them.