it exterminates
his opponents; the Covenanter proclaims that he prefers to die than to
live and see 'this intolerable toleration'; and all the time the Lord
Jesus Christ is shut out. Not wholly shut out, however, for He has in
every age found a shelter and a welcome in the stables and the sheds,
among the ragged, the mean, and the outcasts of humanity.

II

It is not only in the great organisations that bear His name that there
has often been found no room for the Christ; but still less has there
been found room for Him in the social order. This great revolutionary
identifies Himself so closely with humanity, that He declares that
whosoever receives a little child and loves it receives and loves Him.
How then do we deal with the Founder of Christianity as He comes to us
in the form of a little child, saying, 'Receive Me'? ... This is the
way we deal with Him. Every five minutes of the day a baby dies
somewhere in the United Kingdom. There are districts in great cities
where two hundred out of one thousand perish in the first year of life.
A third of the possible population die in the years of childhood. The
horrors of war are small compared to the horrors of peace, to which we
have become so inured that we scarce notice them. We have taken the
sunshine and the fresh air and the starlight from millions of our
fellow citizens and shut them up in barracks and surrounded them with
forces of degeneration, and have provided them a narcotic for their
misery, so that womanhood becomes degraded and childhood pines and
dies. Still, after nineteen centuries, Jesus Christ is shut out from
the social order we have laboriously created. And we celebrate
Christmas Day without so much as a sense of incongruity between our
beliefs and our actions.

II

One of the weirdest symptoms of decay in our day is the way the whole
social system seems to have conspired to shut out the child. In the
last years property-owners had one condition that was unaltered: they
would not let their houses to tenants with children. 'How many
children and how old are they?' was the deciding question that always
shut the door. The coming of a baby was often the signal that brought
an ejectment warrant. The penalty for bringing a child into the world
was being thrown into the street. The men who filled the inn at
Bethlehem with mirth nineteen centuries ago have had a mighty multitude
who shared their spirit. Rents have been to them more to b