About the first use to which any notable invention is put is to spread the gospel of Jesus. The very first book printed on a printing press was the Bible, and this wonderful and perhaps greatest human invention has been busier printing this book than any other to this day and multiplies its copies by the hundred million over the world. The newspaper is a mighty means of spreading his principles. The railway and steamship carry his gospel, and the airship gives wings to the same good news. Telegraph and telephone flash it, and wireless waves set the ether over whole continents and oceans aquiver with the messages of Jesus Christ. The sewing machine sews for him, the typewriter writes for him, and even battle ships and bayonets may fight for him. Sooner or later every inventor must lay his magic machine at his feet. For him the statesman legislates, the scientist investigates, the author writes, the artist paints and the singer sings. In an increasing degree Jesus is drawing all men into his service, and they are laying their treasures at his feet. The gold of the wise men was only the first gleam of the shining heaps of wealth that his followers are now piling on the altar of his service. This process will go on until the whole world will lie at his feet.
Every generation sends a more numerous company to Bethlehem. With every century worshipers arrive from more distant lands. From every quarter of the circumference of the globe paths now run to the manger of this Child, worn deep by millions of feet. The nations are beginning to come. By and by these converging paths will be crowded and all the ends of the earth shall bring their gold and shall worship at his feet.
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?]
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.
But a child has in it the possibility of growth and of imparting regenerating ideas and a new life to the world. Sir Isaac Newton did not give any money or material gift to the world, but he gave it scientific ideas and a scientific spirit, and in giving it this he raised the intellectual level of the world and gave it the power of making millions of money. Shakespeare gave the world no new machine, but he opened the eyes of men to see heavenly visions and thus enriched them with treasures above all the gold of the world. Martin Luther invented no steam engine or sewing machine, but he taught men the rights of conscience and created our modern liberties. No material thing, however powerful and splendid, can make a better world: this work calls for better men. Therefore when God brings into the world a child endowed with superior intellectual and moral power, though his gift is only a babe and seems insignificant and hardly worth counting among so many, yet he has sent one of the greatest gifts of which his omnipotence is capable. An old German schoolmaster always took his hat off to each new boy that came into his school, never knowing what elements of genius might have been mixed in his newly molded brain. When Erasmus came out of that school his prophetic instinct was justified. Never despise a child, for in it sleeps some of the omnipotence and worth of God.
But the Child which God gave the world as its Christmas gift was no merely human child however richly endowed. This Child was human and was born in time, but he was also divine and came forth from eternity. The possibilities that were sleeping in this Child were foreseen by the prophet Isaiah in the names that were prophetically given him, every name being a window through which we can look in upon his personality and power, every title being one of his crowns: “His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” All these powers and possibilities are incarnated in this Child, and he is working them out in a redeemed world. God made no mistake, then, he gave us no small and common gift, but he did his best and gave the world the greatest possible Christmas Gift when this Child was born. All the grass in the world came from one seed, all the roses from one root, and all the redeemed that shall at last populate heaven and fill it with praise throughout eternity shall be saved by the grace and clad in the beauty of this Child.
[XIX. A World Without Christmas]
