If Christmas this sad year is to be a real comfort and help to us, we must realize very clearly what it is that was the cause of the joy of the Angels, and has been always the source of the true joy of Christmas, during the nineteen hundred years or more since that first outburst of heavenly praise and song. The reason had been announced by one Angel to the shepherds abiding in the fields in the words, “Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” The Jewish people were looking and longing for the Christ Who would come, as is expressed in Zacharias’ song, to deliver them from the hand of their enemies, and to grant unto them that they “might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of their life.” This was the promise which, as Zacharias said, had been given by the mouth of God’s prophets since the world began, for which they had craved through long suffering, and captivity, and disappointment; and it is this promise which the angel declared was now fulfilled. A Saviour had been born to them, One Who was able to realize for them the great hopes of blessing which the prophets had held out. He would be able, in the words of another angel, “to save them from their sins,” and by saving them from their sins to save them from the sufferings and sorrows which those sins had entailed upon them. By the birth of our Lord that had become an accomplished fact. There existed from that moment One Who stood between heaven and earth, between God and man, and united both--the Son of God and the Son of Man, with power “to save to the uttermost all who come unto God by Him,” and able, first by His sacrifice for our sins, and then by His exercise of the royal authority and power which are entrusted to Him, to put down all enemies under His feet, and to deliver up the Kingdom to God the Father, “that God may be all in all.”