From sermon I have returned like the others, and it is my purpose to hold Christmas alone.  I have no one with me at table, and my own thoughts must be my Christmas guests.  Sitting here, it is pleasant to think how much kindly feeling exists this present night in England.  By imagination I can taste of every table, pledge every toast, silently join in every roar of merriment.  I become a sort of universal guest.  With what propriety is this jovial season, placed amid dismal December rains and snows!  How one pities the unhappy Australians, with whom everything is turned topsy-turvy, and who hold Christmas at midsummer!  The face of Christmas glows all the brighter for the cold.  The heart warms as the frost increases.  Estrangements which have embittered the whole year, melt in to-night’s hospitable smile.  There are warmer hand-shakings on this night than during the by-past twelve months.  Friend lives in the mind of friend.  There is more charity at this time than at any other.  You get up at midnight and toss your spare coppers to the half-benumbed musicians whiffling beneath your windows, although at any other time you would consider their performance a nuisance, and call angrily for the police.  Poverty, and scanty clothing, and fireless grates, come home at this season to the bosoms of the rich, and they give of their abundance.  The very red-breast of the woods enjoys his Christmas feast.  Good feeling incarnates itself in plum-pudding.  The Master’s words, “The poor ye have always with you,” wear at this time a deep significance.  For at least one night on each year over all Christendom there is brotherhood.  And good men, sitting amongst their families, or by a solitary fire like me, when they remember the light that shone over the poor clowns huddling on the Bethlehem plains eighteen hundred years ago, the apparition of shining angels overhead, the song “Peace on earth and good-will toward men,” which for the first time hallowed the midnight air,—­pray for that strain’s fulfilment, that battle and strife may vex the nations no more, that not only on Christmas-eve, but the whole year round, men shall be brethren owning one Father in heaven.

Although suggested by the season, and by a solitary dinner, it is not my purpose to indulge in personal reminiscence and talk.  Let all that pass.  This is Christmas-day, the anniversary of the world’s greatest event.  To one day all the early world looked forward; to the same day the later world looks back.  That day holds time together.  Isaiah, standing on the peaks of prophecy, looked across ruined empires and the desolations of many centuries, and saw on the horizon the new star arise, and was glad.  On this night eighteen hundred years ago, Jove was discrowned, the Pagan heaven emptied of its divinities, and Olympus left to the solitude of its snows.  On this night, so many hundred years bygone, the despairing voice was heard shrieking on the Aegean, “Pan is dead, great Pan is dead!” On this night, according to the fine reverence of the poets, all things that blast and blight are powerless, disarmed by sweet influence:—­