St. Luke ii. 14.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will towards men.

This is the hymn with which the angels celebrated the incarnation of our Blessed Saviour, and to us, whom the authority of our national Church, the precedent of early antiquity, and the example of the great majority of believers in every age and country invite, as at this time, to give thanks for the same illustrious display of Divine mercy, no fitter subject of devout meditation can be found than the words in which the spirits of Heaven announced that mercy to mankind.

And of the topics of reflection which the words in question offer to the mind, the following are among the most striking. In the first place, the fact itself of that sympathizing joy which the angels are represented as feeling in the event which they announced with so much celestial pomp and splendour, must needs excite in us a powerful apprehension of the greatness and illustrious nature of the benefit thus extended to our race, and may convince us both that those evils are very grievous from which the coming of the Son of God was to free mankind, and those blessings are even greater than our familiarity with them leaves us always able to estimate, which could move beings, so much superior to ourselves, to express such a lively and unusual interest in them.