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may be, this great company of pilgrims belonging to so many climes and ages, in our early Communion on Christmas morning. Let us "go into His true tabernacle, and fall low on our knees before His footstool." a "Let us now go even unto Bethlehem-Ephratah, and see this thing which has come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

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a Ps. cxxxii. 7.

b St. Luke ii. 15.

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SERMON V.

BORN OF A WOMAN.

(CHRISTMAS DAY.)

GAL. IV. 4.

God sent forth His Son, made of a woman.

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'S it not strange," a child once asked his father, "that St. Paul should tell us that our Saviour was a born of a woman? Everybody that I know is born of a woman, and it is hard to see why such a thing should be mentioned as if it were remarkable."

Children, we all of us know, will sometimes take note of truths, or of sides of truth, which, for whatever reason, escape older people. Their minds are not yet worn down or stiffened by a conventional way of looking at things. The world of thought, so far as they come in contact with it, is, like the world of nature, all new ground to them; they have not yet learned to economize time and toil by concentrating attention on some few leading features, and passing over the rest as practically unimportant. Thus they make suggestions and observations which are, sometimes, worth attention, although older people should have failed to make them. Especially in the case of Christian children who have been baptized into Christ, γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός.

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and are thus His members, religious truth presents itself with a clearness which is often forfeited by the sins or the carelessness of later life. Samuel still hears the Divine Voice when Eli may no longer hear it. Let us, then, take the question of this child, as at any rate furnishing a guide to thoughts which will not be out of place on the afternoon of Christmas Day.

I.

"Born of a woman!" Surely there is nothing remarkable in this circumstance, if we take human life as we find it. For us men to be "born of a woman is not merely the rule, it is a rule to which there is no known exception. Since the first parent of our race, no human being has appeared upon this earth who has not owed the debt of existence to the pain and travail of a human mother. The rule holds equally with the wisest, the strongest, the saintliest. Millions there have been among the sons of men who have been also, by Divine grace, made to become sons of God; millions who have been born again, and thus have seen the Kingdom of God. But each one of these was first born of a human mother. So that we are constrained to ask why a circumstance which might have been taken for granted should be invested by the Apostle with such prominence in the case of our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Surely, the real question is whether, in His case, such a circumstance could have been taken for granted. If St. Paul mentions it thus emphatically, it is because he, at least, does not make such an assumption. If, indeed, the Christ Whom St. Paul loved and served was only a son of God by grace, while by nature He was only and purely a man, then to have said that He was "born of a woman

would have been an unmeaning truism. But if, in naming Him, St. Paul is thinking of a Being Whose Nature is such as to make any appearance of His in this earthly sphere in a high degree extraordinary, then to say that He was "born of a woman is to advance an assertion of startling significance.

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Now, that St. Paul is thinking of such a Being is clear. When St. Paul says, "God sent forth His Son," he uses the same word as when he says, "God sent forth the Spirit of His Son." It is a word which does not simply describe the action of God's Providence, whereby He places a being on the scene of created life; it implies a sending forth from the inmost Essence, from the very depths of Deity Itself, of One Who shared the very Nature of the Sender. The Son of God, Whom God sent forth, and Who was born of a woman, was God's own Son, not by grace but by nature; not as being begotten after a lapse of ages, but as, before all worlds, God of God; the Son of God, in a sense unshared by any other, because not other or less than God the Son.

That this is St. Paul's true mind is plain, if we only consider that account of the Son of God which occurs at the beginning of the Epistle to the Colossians. "He is the Image of the Invisible God, the Firstborn of all creation: for in Him were all things created in Heaven and on earth, things visible and things invisible: all things have been created by Him, and for Him and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist." And to say that such a Being as this was born of a woman, is certainly not a truism; it is not an assertion which we should have been prepared to accept unless we were assured of it on sufficient, that is to say, Divine authority. For it means nothing else or less than the c Col. i. 15-17.

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ἐξαπέστειλε.

b Gal, iv. 6.

union of things utterly apart from each other; the union of the Immaterial with matter; the union of the Infinite with the finite; the union of a creature with the Creator.

What was the purpose of this union? We shall best answer that question if we ask another: What was the great trouble of the human soul before Christ our Lord came among us? Surely it was the practical inaccessibility of God.

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The first truth which was revealed to Israel, and which protected the true idea of God in the mind of Israel, was that "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth." This is a truth which, from the nature of the case, could only come by revelation; no man or angel ever witnessed the creation out of nothing. The effect of this truth was to reveal God as having a double relation to the universe. He is, first of all, its Owner; Who has, as such, an absolute disposal of it. He is, secondly, Himself entirely distinct from it. This is the most striking of the two truths implied in the Creation; the profound, impassable, immeasurable gulf between the Creator and His work.

The old paganism was always linking God to Nature, or burying Him in Nature. In ancient Greece, every river, every wood, had its attendant deities; in India, the dawn, the sun, the earth, were worshipped as instinct with Divinity; in the great plain of Chaldæa, the heavenly host, or later, the element of fire; in Phoenicia, the productive powers of Nature. Israel, indeed, knew that "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handy-work." But in Israel, faith in God as the Creator made it impossible to confound Him with the work of His Hands. For Israel, He was "the High and Holy One, that inhabiteth Eternity; He was beyond

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c Isa. lvii. 15.

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