[XXXVII.]
The Manger.
IT is in no spirit of vain superstition that we regard this cradle of an incarnate God. Were the very manger in which Mary laid her heavenly Babe to be placed before our bodily eyes, we should not dare to fall down and worship it. But it is well that faith should linger by the manger of Bethlehem, and endeavour there to gain a more vivid perception of the amazing condescension of Him who came to visit us in great humility. While, therefore, with the shepherds, we adore the Infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, let us attempt to raise our thoughts to the divine nature of Him who, in His poverty and His helplessness, appears to us here so truly human.
"He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." There was no room for Him in the inn. In one sense we might say that there was no room in the world for One:
"Whom heaven cannot contain,
Nor the immeasurable plain
Of vast infinity enclose and circle round."
For, while we rejoicing cry, "Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given," we must also with awe remember that "His name shall be called the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father."
Let us glean from the Scriptures a few from the many proofs that He who was very Man was also very God; that the Babe who lay in the manger was one with Him who filleth the throne of Heaven. Unless we keep this "central truth" steadily before us, we shall have a very faint idea of the love and grace implied in the words, "who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven."
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him." Such is the sublime commencement of the Gospel of the beloved disciple, upon whom rested the Spirit of Truth.
John had probably been present when the lips of the persecuted Jesus of Nazareth uttered the mysterious sentence, "I and My Father are One;" and he heard from the risen Saviour that revelation of Himself, "I am Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last." Here was the Lord of Heaven, repeating His own solemn declaration, uttered when He abode upon earth—that declaration for which the Jews would have stoned Him as a blasphemer—"before Abraham was, I AM." In that mysterious sentence, Christ assumed to Himself that incommunicable name by which God made Himself known unto Moses as the eternal Deity, to whom the past and the future form but one everlasting present. Eternity, it has been said, is the lifetime of God.
St. Paul also bears witness to Him who lay in the manger of Bethlehem, as the Creator and Preserver, as well as the Saviour of the world. "God . . . hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed Heir of all things; 'by whom also He made the world:' who, being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and 'upholding all things by the word of His power,' when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high." St. Paul quotes from the Psalms the testimony of the Eternal Father to the dignity of the Redeemer: "Unto the Son He saith, 'Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever!'"