Therefore the Child who is born of Mary in Bethlehem while the angels are singing their carols over the fields where the shepherds watch, the Child Who brings peace to men of good will, still, after nearly two thousand years, finds His gift ignored and His longing to lift men to God unsatisfied. "He came unto His own and His own received Him not"--and the conditions are not vitally changed to-day. When we think of a world of fifteen hundred million human beings, the number of those who profess and call themselves Christians is comparatively small; the number of actually practicing Christians, of men and women who do live by the Gospel, without reserve and without compromise, is vastly smaller. The resistance of the principles of the Gospel is to-day intense; the demand for compromise is insistent. We are asked to throw over a system which has obviously failed, and to accept as the equivalent and to permit to pass under the same name a system which is fundamentally different; a system whose end is man and not God, whose means are natural and not supernatural, which seek to produce an adjustment with this world that means comfort, rather than an adjustment with the spiritual world which means sanctity. The ideal achievement of peace is here in Bethlehem where the mother holds the Holy Child to her breast, while her spirit is utterly in union with Him Who is both man and God. There is never any break in the pure peace of S. Mary because there is never any moment when her will is separated from the will of God, when her union with Him fails. This peace of perfect union has, through the merits of her Son, been hers always; she has never known the wrench of the will that separates itself from God. She has always been poor; she has been perplexed with life; she has suffered and will suffer intensely, suffer most where she loves most; but peace she has never lost, because her will has never wavered in its allegiance. What visibly she is doing in these moments of her great joy, holding God to her breast in a passion of love, she in fact is doing always--always is she one with God.