What irony, if these Wise Men were heirs of the former captors, yet made a long journey to kneel before the son of David! We should like to know what they thought, and just why they gave their handsome gifts, and what they said when they got home. But their departure is as inscrutable as their going. Whoever reported the story was either setting down an event which happened, in which the mystery of the East was felt, or else he was a supreme artist. Christmas-time would be far poorer without the Wise Men and their star. Commentators like to point out that the shepherds and the Wise Men establish a certain balance in the legend the revelation of the Child was to both Jews and Gentiles. A literary man, interested in the problem of language, in the miracle of revelation which occurs whenever we speak and are understood, would stress rather the fact that the shepherds, who were used to angels, heard angels, and the Wise Men saw the star. It was the astonishment of Pentecost a little early-men learning, each in his own tongue, the wonderful works of God. Some of us still hear angels. For the moment, however, we might consider the point of view which is accustomed

to stars.

The old astrology, and some modern attempts to revive it, would suggest that the stars compel us. In their orbits and conjunctions our fate moves, or reaches a crisis. This idea of compulsion science has dislodged from the stars, though man, who loves to think he is compelled, remains unconvinced; he persists in locating his pet fate somewhere, if not in the skies, at least in the atom,

in the cell, where his ancestors can take the blame, or pass it on back. Yet the stars continue to control us, by stirring the imagination and by enlisting our love. If they do not drive, they surely lead us. We can think of nothing more apt, when we reach for an image of the soul. The sun is too hot, and both sun and moon are too variable. Worst of all, there is only one of each; they mean little to us, even in the measurement of time, unless we refer them to something fixed on earth. Perhaps that is why the beauty they suggest is physical, not altogether of heaven. But the stars appear in their orders and celestial patterns, they march before us at the hour when contemplation is a strong instinct, and they seem complete in themselves, as heavenly monitors should be.

It is not surprising that man thought himself of some importance to the stars, and gradually persuaded his primitive heart that these far lights in their stately dance were planning his future for him. Not surprising when you consider the disproportion there otherwise is between the pygmy traveler or mariner and the gigantic worlds he uses to steer his course. The disproportion is as great in the compass, but there it is somewhat concealed from casual philosophy. Finding your way by the stars, however, you could hardly escape the thought that their serviceableness springs from a friendly interest, at least. Milton makes Adam ask Raphael about it. It doesn't seem economical, he says, to set all these worlds in motion just to provide light for man and his wife. From such an idea a mind less steady

than Milton's might easily proceed to the belief that stars furnish more than light.

They do, as a matter of fact. If we are no longer important to them, they become constantly more important to us. If for no other purpose, we need them to talk with. They are the metaphor of great souls, who are wise, following light, or who follow light because they are wise. Perhaps we needn't ask what the three kings said when they went home. Perhaps there was nothing to say. Perhaps the following of the star was its own reward, and the finding of the child marked the end of the heavenly pilgrimage. Of course in the Christmas story all lesser interests lead to the Child, yet it is not out of the Christmas spirit to interpret the gifts of the Wise Men as thank-offerings for the starry guide, votive trophies to commemorate a journey through light.

ANGELS: And some of us do hear angels. The Child brings them to mind. One especially, that angel who spoke to the shepherds. Afterward there were a host with him, praising God suddenly or perhaps the minds of the shepherds were slow, and their perception gradual. Once they were aware of angels, however, they continued to find them; kneeling before the manger at Bethlehem, they saw beside them oxen and shining seraphs.

Angels are the language of another day. Yet no language once spoken by man is dead, not even though we may have forgotten or abandoned it. And at Christmas-time we haven't quite forgotten. At other seasons

we speak in a less vivid reality. The messengers which now ply from the infinite to man's intelligence are so numerous, so varied, so subtle, that we lack time and energy to envisage them as persons. Our heralds of service and of power, our bringers of sound and light, we are content to name in large groups. We call them, not cherubim, seraphim, powers, principalities, but imagination, instinct, foresight, intuition, subliminal consciousness. Remembering a little Greek, we say an angel was only a messenger—and we lose our angels in an etymology. But some of them we lose more reluctantly than others. The angel of annunciation may have left us without being missed; the angels of the resurrection too, perhaps, and even our guardian angel. But the Christmas angels are the last we willingly let go. At this season of infinite good-will, the state of mind returns to us which first, ages ago, made them necessary to the story of the child.

The theologian has his own way of dealing with the matter a great way, in the ages of great theologians. But theology, too, is a language, a method of expression to which man is urged by a profound and difficult subject-matter. Simple folk, who have their moment of importance at Christmas-time, like to turn their backs on those disputes of the doctors, which issue-so it seems to the simple-in little grace. We prefer to read the story with the help of our best experience, with a lowly heart, in the old phrase, but at least with a loving one. According to the text itself, nothing was said to the shepherds and the Wise Men about the

divinity of the Child. They saw that for themselves. They would perhaps have been astonished, peasant and king alike, if there at the manger, in the mother's presence, the appearance of divinity in the infant had been substantiated by those statements as to its paternity which an unimaginative age now makes from the pulpit. We envy these first pilgrims, who were permitted to translate their own adoring hearts into the conviction that what they looked on was divine, offspring and essence of God. We, too, should like to be summoned, not by a creed, but by angels and a star. We envy the blind man who called to Christ from the wayside and was cured. To begin with, he had only a need, and perhaps a hope. His theology came as the consequence of his experience; he saw, and Christ was divine. If you say skeptically that the blind man in his gratitude exaggerated, we know you have never been hopelessly blind-and then cured.

To understand the Christmas angels, we have only to remember the experience which first spoke through them, and the hope which led to that experience. Long ago the Hebrew prophets, in spite of their emphasis on the exclusiveness of their race, their special favor with God, dreamed of a universal possibility in character; of a character, that is, which should be valid not for all times and in all places, but for all worlds and for all states of existence. That profound East, out of which came the wise kings, speculated richly about all varieties of the infinite; the Hebrews limited themselves somewhat, and considered the

universally moral. It was a dream of what we might call in the truest sense the catholic virtues, virtues which would be approved anywhere, at any time, as in science the law of gravitation is approved. Indeed, this ancient vision of character had in it just the notion of infinite applicability which we look for in a scientific principle. Our chemistry and our physics must hold for all the worlds we can find with the eye, with the telescope, or with the imagination. Everywhere two and two must be four. The Hebrew people had spent centuries wrestling with nations whose virtues were to them as vices. Even Jehovah had to fight his way against rival deities. No wonder they began to reach after the idea of a set of virtues which would be at home not only among every tribe of men, but throughout all ascending and descending states of being.

This universality they naturally ascribed to their God. It was what they thought of first, when they considered his character at all: "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there."

A set of virtues which should be valid through all states of being, from the humblest of finite things to the last reach of infinite goodness. The same set of virtues, the same character at every stage, no doubt— yet how to express that long ladder with all the steps bridging between the heavenly home and the earthly house of God? Moving figures from older religions were ready to handthe winged beasts of the apocalyptic books, the messengers with many faces, the magic wheels. Contem

plating the image of God, they began to see angels.

There was one limitation in this Hebrew dream, or so many men felt. These universal virtues belonged only to God; man had no hope of acquiring them. Angels were no language with which to speak of ourselves. Furthermore, the attention of the dream was on the universality; the race was not agreed as to what the virtues were. The point of the The point of the Christmas story is that to simple men and to wise kings, at the same moment, the child was revealed. In childhood they saw universal virtue, and they realized that the dream had been made man. However the idea might be argued afterward, at the moment it carried conviction in itself, like those laws of nature which need only to be observed to be believed, so infinitely illuminating they are. This child brought this sort of persuasion, there in the manger, later at Nazareth, later on the cross. He would be the same personality, with the same appeal, whether living or in hell, or neighbor to the Father of all in heaven. There was so much of him to know, you needed the help of other creatures than man to know it; so much of him to praise, you needed aid in worship. His friends and companions "heard the voice of many angels round about the throne

Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him."

If the child did not mean all the human things we find in his face, asleep in the manger, perhaps Christmas would never have become the great feast of the year, not even for the devout believer. For him, Easter ought to be the climax of his yearly ritual. The child might have been divinely born; yet without the hope of immortality, what would the Christian theology mean? If the child did not still excite in our hearts ineffable emotion, we should not cling as we do to our Christmas angels; those others who rolled away the stone would be more comforting. We don't need the shepherds in the story; at least, they are not essential. The Wise Men would have sufficed. After all, the shepherds made no great effort; they only walked to the neighboring town, and perhaps they never thought much of what they saw. Their praise to God may have been for hearing those lovely messengers. But even now, when we see the child, the Christmas angels return to our speech. They are simpler than others, as befits the character they express. They are not terrible. Their chief use is not to tell us that Christ is born. should not need so many for that; one was enough for the shepherds. But we still like to have with us, as they had suddenly with them, a multitude of the heavenly host, helping us in their orders to chant the infinite range of life and love and birth, which with God is glory and with man is peace.

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