How shall we attain it?  By being men of good will, plainly.  But what constitutes good will in a man?  That which I have already discussed, perhaps abundantly, simplicity and childlike obedience of character.  S. Joseph, the guardian of Mary and her Child here in Bethlehem, is the best example we can have of a man of good will, a man who under the most difficult circumstances responded with perfect readiness and complete obedience to the heavenly message that came to him.  This is to be his course through the few years that he will live, to give himself to the will of God in the care of Jesus.  We are men of good will if we do whatsoever our Lord says to us, if we are seeking first of all the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, if our estimate of values corresponds to our Lord’s.

There is our trouble—­that old trouble of feebly trying to live the life of the Kingdom when what we actually want is the offer of this world.  There is, there can be, no peace in a divided life.  There is a certain spiritual sloth which has the exterior look of peace, as a corpse looks peaceful, but it has no relation to the peace which God gives.  It is in fact the wages of sin, wages easily earned and long enjoyed.  But so long as we are spiritually alive, so long we cannot enjoy whole-heartedly even the most fascinating of sins because there is lurking in the background the sense of the transitoriness of our sin and of the imminence of death and judgment.  There is the skeleton in every man’s closet until he finally makes choice on one side or the other.  For we are not ignorant of the spiritual obligations of life.  We always know more than we have achieved.  When we talk about our ignorance and perplexity, we are not meaning ignorance and perplexity about the obligation to live in a certain way, and to perform certain duties, on this particular day:  rather we are making this alleged ignorance of the future an excuse for not taking action in the present, action which we know to be obligatory.

And peace is so wonderful a gift!  To feel oneself in harmony with God, to know that one is carefully seeking His will and making it one’s first and highest duty to perform it.  To have found the peace of the forgiven soul as the result of absolution, at the expense of much shame and repugnance, it may be, but with what marvellous compensations when we go away with a sense of restored purity and the friendship of God—­life looks so different when we look at it through purified eyes!  The old life has held us so tightly, the old sins have clung so close; and then there was a day when we gave up self and turned to God and the Gift of God in Jesus Christ; and then we saw how miserable and vile and naked we had been all through the time of our boasted freedom; and we came as children to Mary’s Child and offered ourselves to Him for cleansing.  We kneel and offer to Him our wills and ask that they may be made good, and kept good in union with His most holy