In a much greater crisis, where the stakes were deeper, the question being not one of peace or war between man and man, but between man and God, an embassy from heaven reached the borders of our world. Unlike Elijah, rough in dress, of aspect stern and speech severe, whose appearance struck Ahab with terror, and wrung from the pale lips of the conscience-stricken king the cry, "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?"--unlike Jonah as he walked the wondering streets, and woke their echoes with his doleful cry, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed,"--the ambassadors were "a multitude of shining angels." Leaving the gates of heaven, they winged their flight down the starry sky to descend and hover above the fields of Bethlehem, and in the form of a song, as became such joyful tidings, to proclaim news of Peace--their song, "Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good-will toward men." Nothing presents a more remarkable example of "much in little" than these few but weighty words. In small crystals, that coat, as with shining frost-work, the sides of a vessel, we have all the salts which give perpetual freshness to the ocean, their life to the weeds that clothe its rocks, and to the fish that swim its depths and shallows. In some drops of oil distilled from rose-leaves of Indian lands, and valued at many times their weight in gold, we have enclosed within one small phial the perfume of a whole field of roses--that which, diffused through ten thousand leaves, gave every flower its fragrance. Essences, as they are called, present, in a concentrated form, the peculiar properties of leaves or flowers or fruits, of the animal, vegetable, or earthly bodies from which they are extracted; and, like these, this hymn presents the whole gospel in a single sentence. Here is the Bible, the scheme of redeeming love, that grand work which saved a lost world, gladdened angels in heaven, confounded devils in hell, and engaged the highest attributes of the Godhead, summed up in one short, glorious, glowing paragraph. For what so much as the gospel, what, indeed, but the gospel, yields Jehovah the highest glory, blesses our earth with peace, and expresses Heaven's good-will to the sons of men? Such were the ambassadors, and such the embassage!