Friends, Readers, let your hearts apply the lesson of this day, and let your hearts be cheered and solemnized by its associations. Think of your homes and the loved ones there. Think too of the loved ones departed, and deem them not lost, but gone before! Love your children, and love them the more by looking on them in the gospel light, by loving them as in God and Christ!
Think too of our own early days. How vividly they at times come back, so that we almost forget maturity and its cares, and are children once more. Let them come back now, and with them all their tender associations—with them thoughts of early home; brothers, sisters, father, and more than all of her, who stood to us in Mary’s place, and blessed us with a Christian Mother’s love!
But can the association rest there? No! Upward to Him, so holy in childhood, so glorious in maturity—to Him, Friend and Saviour, Messiah, from whom our best blessings flow, let our gratitude rise, and to God, through Him, let our devotion be exalted! We have no hymn to the Virgin Mother, no Ora pro Nobis for the beatified Madonna. Simple faith is better than romantic tradition. To us heaven is fairer for possessing that Mother and that Child.
Christmas Day.