It is a week now since “when all things were in a quiet silence and that night in the midst of her swift course” the Eternal Word leaped from the throne of the heavens to the throne of straw. For a week he has shared the bed and shelter of the ox. Unable to do more than feed and cry, he has lain in Mary’s arms and cried for her breast. Out into the star-pricked winter darkness creeps the wailing of the speechless Word. He is the Word—he cannot speak. He is the Energy that set the worlds in motion—he lies helpless on his mother’s lap. But now a new note has come into his cry of hunger and helplessness—the note of pain. He who is the End of the Law submits to the means he has ordained for approaching himself. He who is the Light of the World enters the thick darkness where Moses found God. He will make Sinai a foothill to Calvary.... “Verily I say unto you, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil”—perhaps to destroy by fulfilling, as an ancient bottle is burst with new-made wine. The veil of the temple is rent in twain at the cry of ‘Consummatum est,’ and in that hour the Law of Moses stands both destroyed and fulfilled. So the child in Mary’s arms is really a mighty, propitiatory child. The Precious Blood did not fall only on Calvary but at Bethlehem. It was there that the fountain was first opened for sin and uncleanness, in the first dark hours of the year. As the winter sun shall mount at last into the blazing heavens of July, so he too will pass through shattering equinoxes of redemption to his ascended summer calm. But our New Year’s worship is for him in his winter helplessness, his smallness, his obedience to the frosty fierceness of the law. He is the pattern of our Faith—its helplessness in its first struggle for life—for what are its two thousand years in his sight but as yesterday?—its smallness, as it lies in the stable of humble intellects and impulsive hearts—its half-conscious obedience to laws which are the patterns of heavenly things—its blood-shedding in that obedience.... We are often too confident of our Faith, just as our enemies are too contemptuous of it—we and they forget that it is still only a child, existing chiefly by desire, by feeling, by necessity.