What is the explanation of the mighty, worldwide, attractive power of this Child?  There is only one adequate explanation:  “He shall save his people from their sins.”  The world is tired of men who come to save it with programmes only an inch long; who have nothing better to propose than longer laws and cleaner sanitation; who, unmindful of the experiment in Eden, would have us believe that if we were only placed in a pleasant garden where we had plenty to eat and little to do we would all be good.  The weary world wants one who can go to the root of its unrest, and it is finding out that this can be done by him who is mighty to save people from their sins.  All who put their trust in him are blessed with purity and peace.  In this great world, lost in sin and beaten upon by infinite mystery, there is only one voice that comes like music across our life with power to cleanse and comfort us; and this is the Voice whose infant cry was first heard in 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.