[Footnote 1: In the catalogues of the collection of drawings in this room, and in my "Queen of the Air" you will find all that I would ask you to notice about the various names and kinds of the flower, and their symbolic use.--Note only, with respect to our present purpose, that while the true white lily is placed in the hands of the Angel of the Annunciation even by Florentine artists, in their general design, the fleur-de-lys is given to him by Giovaiini Pisano on the façade of Orvieto; and that the flower in the crown-circlets of European kings answers, as I stated to you in my lecture on the Corona, to the Narcissus fillet of early Greece; the crown of abundance and rejoicing.] 253. In the passage, so often read by us, which announces the advent of Christianity as the dawn of peace on earth, we habitually neglect great part of the promise, owing to the false translation of the second clause of the sentence. I cannot understand how it should be still needful to point out to you here in Oxford that neither the Greek words [Greek: *"en anthriopois evdokia,"*] nor those of the vulgate, "in terra pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis," in the slightest degree justify our English words, "goodwill to men." Of God's goodwill to men, and to all creatures, for ever, there needed no proclamation by angels. But that men should be able to please _Him_,--that their wills should be made holy, and they should not only possess peace in themselves, but be able to give joy to their God, in the sense in which He afterwards is pleased with His own baptized Son;--this was a new thing for Angels to declare, and for shepherds to believe. 254. And the error was made yet more fatal by its repetition in a passage of parallel importance,--the thanksgiving, namely, offered by Christ, that His Father, while He had hidden what it was best to know, not from the wise and prudent, but from some among the wise and prudent, and had revealed it unto babes; not 'for so it seemed good' in His sight, but 'that there might be well pleasing in His sight,'--namely, that the wise and simple might equally live in the necessary knowledge, and enjoyed presence, of God. And if, having accurately read these vital passages, you then as carefully consider the tenour of the two songs of human joy in the birth of Christ, the Magnificat, and the Nunc dimittis, you will find the theme of both to be, not the newness of blessing, but the equity which disappoints the cruelty and humbles the strength of men; which scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts; which fills the hungry with good things; and is not only the glory of Israel, but the light of the Gentiles.