So we watch the New Life lying on the Winter’s lap, submitting itself humbly and sweetly to nature and mankind, surrounded by dangers that threaten it—the shouts of Herod’s soldiers are not far off—suffering the pains and indignities that accompany its surrender to our limitations, baptising itself into our humanity with blood. Mary and Joseph—the loving and the wise among us—know that it will live best in the warm air of simplicity, homeliness and familiarity, of childhood and the hearth. It must be sheltered from the windy blasts of dispute, and wrapped from the frosts of prohibitions; it must not be brought into the cold halls of pomposity, nor starved by cutting off from the six days of common things.... Mary and Joseph must be careful guardians of the New Life if it is to grow through the slow ages of the world’s future—as life grew humble and close to the ground through the ages of her past—till it is old enough to claim its manhood—till it attains at last to the full stature of the Cross. February _Month of Light in Darkness_ It is still very calm—but the frost is over. The hardness is gone from the air, and the cold, and that chill sense of binding. Instead, there is a feeling of moisture, which is also a feeling of growth—of the first growth. Already that growth has become apparent in the delicate catkins that hang from the hedges, in the frail budding of the trees. As yet there is no green, only a brown stickiness—no unfurling, only a close-packed promise. But life and growth are there, in the hedges, in the woods, and in the moist, rain-drenched earth, whose scents are carried up the lane by the breeze which has the first spring warmth in it. A slow light spreads over the fields at evening—yellow, rainy, reflected in the ponds and in the watery ruts. It is a faint light, a watery light, but it shines where a month ago was darkness. * * * * * Once, long ages ago, there was only twilight in the world—not a twilight of the sun, though those were days of ice and snow and a strange desolation, but a twilight in the soul and mind of man, dimness and faintness and pale struggle in the spirit and mind and intellect—a world in which the earliest man saw men only as trees walking.