The Unknown Giver...

Cuddle Baby Jesus.

        Dear Grace or dear Robert, if you and I can remember how many people there are in the world who are working for us every day, though we do not know it, that will be a good Christmas memory for you and me. Not only on Christmas morning, but every morning, our daily bread comes to us because a thousand brave men and a thousand brave women are at work in the world trying to do God's will here as it is done everywhere else in His heaven. We will not forget this as we meet at Christmas, on this blessed Christmas Day.

       Christmas sets one careening back a little, to look at that mysterious connection of Rome with Christianity, which has held on so steadily since the first Christmas got itself put on historical record by a Roman census maker. Humanly speaking, it is nothing more nor less than a Roman census which makes the word Bethlehem to be a sacred word over all the world today. To any person who sees the humorous contrasts of history there is reason for a bit of a smile when he thinks of the way this census came into being, and then remembers what came of it. Here was a consummate movement of Augustus, who would fain have the statistics of his empire. Such excellent things are statistics. So Augustus orders his census, and his census is taken. This Quirinus, or Quirinius, pro-consul of Syria, was the first man who took it there, says the Bible. Doubtless it was a great staff achievement of Quirinus, and made much talk in its time. And it is so well condensed at last, and put into tables with indexes and averages, as to be very creditable, I will not doubt, to the census bureau. But alas! as time rolls on, things change, so that this very Quirinus, who, with all a pro-consul's power, took such pains to record for us the number of people there were in Bethlehem and in Judah, would have been clean forgotten himself, and his census, too, but that things turned bottom upward. The meanest child born in Bethlehem when this census business was going on happened to prove to be the King of the World. It happened that he overthrew the dynasty of Caesar Augustus, and his temples, and his empire. It happened that everything which was then established tottered and fell, as the star of this child arose. And the child's star did rise.

Mary and Joseph. 2020