Bethlehem. Let us now go
even unto Bethlehem while the song is in the air and see this Child and
worship at his feet.




XVIII. Was a Child the Best Christmas Gift to the World?


When we come to think of it, does not a child seem an insignificant and
disappointing gift for God to make to the world? After so long
preparation and so great promises and hopes, would we not have expected
some greater and more wonderful gift? But a child is so common; millions
are born every month; there is nothing unique and wonderful about a
child. Why did God not rather give some invention or discovery or piece
of knowledge that would revolutionize and bless the world? Would he not
have done enormously more for mankind if in the first century of our era
he had given them the printing press, or the steam engine, or the
electric light? May there not yet be waiting for us some invention or
knowledge that will work wonders beyond anything we have dreamed and
shower material comforts on the world?

This thought grows out of our blind materialism which leads us to think
that matter is the master of mind, circumstance more important than
character and the things of the body than the things of the spirit. But
material improvements do not necessarily improve men. The locomotive has
little relation to character. It picks a man up at one point and drops
him at another the same man he was. If he is selfish and wicked at the
beginning of the journey, he is just as selfish and wicked at its end.
It is a simple fact that all our material progress works little
improvement in morals. At the hour Christ was born Rome had an amazing
material civilization, blazing with splendor, but all the more rapidly
was it rotting at the core.

But a child has in it the possibility of growth and of imparting
regenerating ideas and a new life to the world. Sir Isaac Newton did not
give any money or material gift to the world, but he gave it scientific
ideas and a scientific spirit, and in giving it this he raised the
intellec