Circles are broken, families are separated, loved ones are lost, but the old world sweeps on.  Others come to take our places.  As we stood at the knee of some unforgotten mother, so other children stand.  As we listened to the story of the Christ Child from the lips of some grey old father, so other children listen and we ourselves perchance are fathers or mothers too.  Other groups come to us for the deathless story.  Little heads which recall vanished halcyon days of youth bend around another younger mother.  Smaller hands than ours write letters to Santa Claus and hear the story, the sweetest story ever told, of the Baby who came to Mary and through her to all the daughters and sons of women on that winter night on the Bethlehem hills.

And we thank God for the children who take us out of the past, out of ourselves, away from recollections that weigh us down; the children that weave in the woof and warp of life when our own youth has passed, some of the buoyancy, the joy, the happiness of the present; the children in whose opening lives we turn hopefully to the future.  We thank God at this Christmas season that it pleased Him to send His beloved Son to come to us as a little child, like any other child.  We thank God that in the lesser sense we may see in every child who comes to-day another incarnation of divinity.  We thank God for the portion of His Spirit with which He dowers every child of man, just as we thank Him for pouring it all upon the Infant in the Manger.

There is no age that has not had its prophet.  No country, no people, but that has produced its leader.  But did any of them ever before come as a little child?  Did any of them begin to lead while yet in arms?  Lodges there upon any other baby brow “the round and top of sovereignty?” What distinguished Christ and His Christian followers from all the world?  Behold! no mighty monarch, but “a little child shall lead them!”

You may see through the glass darkly, you may not know or understand the blessedness of faith in Him as He would have you know it, but there is nothing that can dim the light that radiates from that birth in the rude cave back of the inn.  Ah, it pierces through the darkness of that shrouding night.  It shines to-day.  Still sparkles the Star in the East.  He is that Star.

There is nothing that can take from mankind—­even doubting mankind—­the spirit of Christ and the Christmas season.  Our celebrations do not rest upon the conclusions of logic, or the demonstrations of philosophy; I would not even argue that they depend inevitably or absolutely upon the possession of a certain faith in Jesus, but we accept Christmas, nevertheless; we endeavour to apply the Christmas spirit, for just once in the year; it may be because we cannot, try as we may, crush out utterly and entirely the divinity that is in us that makes for God.  The stories and tales for Christmas which have for their theme the hard heart softened are not mere fictions of the imagination.  They rest upon an instinctive consciousness of a profound philosophic truth.