We have only to look at him with eyes cleansed by gazing at the Child in the manger and we realise how tawdry a god this Mammon is. What can he do for us? Nothing of any worth. He has never minted a coinage which can buy the inspiration of a noble thought, which can purchase love for the starved heart, or can endow a man with the vision and the faculty divine. One has but to consider a moment and he will realise the poverty-stricken condition of Mammon's devotees. They can command speed on earth or in the air; they can fly a hundred miles an hour; but what is the good when at the end of the hundred miles they are as at the beginning--sated, restless, and dissatisfied? They can command no speed by which they can escape from themselves. And it is vain to wing a flight upwards through the air if heaven be empty overhead; vain to alight five hundred miles away if on earth there be no temple, no holy day, no shrine at which to worship. 'You own the land,' said the poor painter to the new-rich who boasted his land: 'you own the land but I own the landscape.' The great gift is to own the landscape. And no money ever bought that. The only thing Mammon can do is to secure food, shelter, and clothes. It can also secure freedom from work--but that is a freedom shared with the tramp. Life is greater far than livelihood; and the worshippers of Mammon lose the very essence and the end of life in a vain pursuit of the means of living. That is the witness raised by Christmas as it calls the nations to realise the true greatness of man. To a generation that has made life a hectic rush after money and pleasure, Christmas testifies that to estimate any man by the money he owns is to blaspheme against the Child laid in the manger. The wealth of Croesus makes him but the prey of the conqueror, and the dust of centuries has buried the pomp and glory of emperors. But this Child, cradled in poverty, reigns from generation to generation. The voice of an Alexander or a Napoleon would to-day cause no heart to beat quicker; but millions would die for Him. And that because He alone revealed to men the things that are unpurchasable, the riches that are unseen. He alone made men realise that a man's life consisteth not in the things that he possesseth, but rather in the thoughts that he thinks, in the motives that sway his action; in the ideals towards which he presses; in the God whom he worships and makes his own. How great a revolution He made. That one hour in the manger has changed the world. Every time I sit down to write a letter and head it 1922 I bear witness to the truth--that the world I know began when a Child laid in the manger brought to earth the realisation that all the great and noble things in life can be mine--though my raiment be shabby and though my banker never thinks it worth his while to throw me even a word when I reluctantly pass in through his swing door. What a wonderful new wine He brought, and how