he is in himself, we cannot understand; but Jesus Christ we can.  When we are told to love God, if we look to the life and death of Christ, we can understand and feel how truly he deserves our love; when we are told to be perfect as God is perfect, we have the image of this perfection so truly set before us in his Son Jesus, that it may be well said, “Whoso hath seen Him hath seen the Father;” and why, then, should we ask with Philip, that “He should show us the Father?”

What, then, the festival of Christmas presents to us, as distinct from that of Easter, is generally the revelation of God in the flesh.  True it is, that we may make it, if we will, the same as Easter:  that is, we may celebrate it as the birth of our Saviour, of him who died and rose again for us; but then we only celebrate our Lord’s birth with reference to his death and resurrection:  that is, we make Christmas to be Easter under another name.  And so everything relating to our Lord may be made to refer to his death and resurrection; for in them consists our redemption, and for that reason Easter has ever been considered as the great festival of the Christian year.  But yet apart from this, Christmas has something peculiarly its own:  namely, as I said before, the revelation of God in the flesh, not only to make atonement for our sins,—­which is the peculiar subject of the celebration of the season of Easter,—­but to give us notions of God at once distinct and lively; to enable us to have One in the invisible world, whom we could conceive of as distinctly as of a mere man, yet whom we might love with all our hearts, and trust with all our hearts, and yet be guilty of no idolatry.

It is not, then, only as the beginning of an earthly life of little more than thirty years, that we may celebrate the day of our Lord’s birth in the flesh.  His own words express what this day has brought to us:  “Henceforth shall ye see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.”  The words here, like so many of our Lord’s, are expressed in a parable; but their meaning is not the less clear.  They allude evidently to Jacob’s vision, to the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, on which the angels were ascending and descending continually.  But this vision is itself a parable; showing, under the figure of the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, and the angels going up and down on it, a free communication, as it were, between God and man, heaven brought nearer to earth, and heavenly things made more familiar.  Now, this is done, in a manner, by every revelation from God; most of all, by the revelation of his Son.  Nor is it only by his Spirit that Christ communicates with us even now; though, he is ascended again into heaven, yet the benefits of his having become man, over and above those of his dying and rising again for us, have not yet passed away.  It is still the man Christ Jesus who brings heaven near to earth, and earth near to heaven.