Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/285

Rh green branches of the Christmas-tree. But alas for the broken household band! God give to them more of His dear love that heals the wounded heart.

To-day the watchful shepherd shouts his welcome over the new cradle of an old truth. This truth has traversed night, through gloom to glory, from cradle to crown. To the awakened consciousness, the Bethlehem babe has left his swaddling-clothes (material environments) for the form and comeliness of the divine ideal, which has passed from a corporeal to the spiritual sense of Christ and is winning the heart of humanity with ineffable tenderness. The Christ is speaking for himself and for his mother, Christ's heavenly origin and aim. To-day the Christ is, more than ever before, “the way, the truth, and the life,” — “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” healing all sorrow, sickness, and sin. To this auspicious Christmastide, which hallows the close of the nineteenth century, our hearts are kneeling humbly. We own his grace, reviving and healing. At this immortal hour, all human hate, pride, greed, lust should bow and declare Christ's power, and the reign of Truth and Life divine should make man's being pure and blest.

Beloved Students: — For your manifold Christmas memorials, too numerous to name, I group you in one benison and send you my Christmas gift, two words enwrapped, — love and thanks.

To-day Christian Scientists have their record in the monarch's palace, the Alpine hamlet, the Christian traveller's resting-place. Wherever the child looks up in