"Thou art beautiful above the sons of men: grace is poured abroad in Thy lips; therefore hath God blessed Thee forever. Gird Thy sword upon Thy thigh, O Thou most mighty. With Thy comeliness and Thy beauty, set out, proceed prosperously and reign." --Ps. xliv. 3-5. The Church calls on us to-day to rejoice and be glad for the Incarnation of the Son of God. With a celebration peculiar to this Feast, she breaks the dead silence of the night with her first Mass of joy. {283} She repeats it again as the east reddens with the dawn. And still again, when the sun is shining in full day, she offers anew a Mass of thanksgiving for a blessing which can never be sufficiently praised and magnified. I have thought that I could not better attune your hearts to all this gladness and gratitude than by reminding you of one of the motives of the Incarnation. Why did our Lord become man? and why did He become Man in the way He did? I answer, out of His desire to be loved by us. There is a love of benevolence, which is content simply with doing good without asking a return. God has this love for us. Nature and reason tell us so. "_He maketh His sun to rise on the good and the bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust_." [Footnote 45] [Footnote 45: St. Matt. v. 45.] And there is another love, the love of friendship, which seeks to be united to the object of its love. And the Incarnation shows us that God has this kind of love for man. His love makes us lovable in His eyes, and this again makes Him vehemently desire our love. This will be my subject this morning--the Incarnation, an evidence of God's desire to be loved by us.