seen the Father;" and why, then, should we ask with
Philip, that "He should show us the Father?"

What, then, the festival of Christmas presents to us, as distinct from
that of Easter, is generally the revelation of God in the flesh. True it
is, that we may make it, if we will, the same as Easter: that is, we may
celebrate it as the birth of our Saviour, of him who died and rose again
for us; but then we only celebrate our Lord's birth with reference to
his death and resurrection: that is, we make Christmas to be Easter
under another name. And so everything relating to our Lord may be made
to refer to his death and resurrection; for in them consists our
redemption, and for that reason Easter has ever been considered as the
great festival of the Christian year. But yet apart from this, Christmas
has something peculiarly its own: namely, as I said before, the
revelation of God in the flesh, not only to make atonement for our
sins,--which is the peculiar subject of the celebration of the season of
Easter,--but to give us notions of God at once distinct and lively; to
enable us to have One in the invisible world, whom we could conceive of
as distinctly as of a mere man, yet whom we might love with all our
hearts, and trust with all our hearts, and yet be guilty of no idolatry.

It is not, then, only as the beginning of an earthly life of little more
than thirty years, that we may celebrate the day of our Lord's birth in
the flesh. His own words express what this day has brought to us:
"Henceforth shall ye see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending
and descending upon the Son of man." The words here, like so many of our
Lord's, are expressed in a parable; but their meaning is not the less
clear. They allude evidently to Jacob's vision, to the ladder reaching
from earth to heaven, on which the angels were ascending and descending
continually. But this vision is itself a parable; showing, under the
figure of the ladder reaching from earth to heaven, and the angels going
up and down on it, a free communication, as it were, between God and
man, heaven brought nearer to earth, and heavenly things made more
familiar. Now, this is done, in a manner, by every revelation from God;
most of all, by the revelation of his Son. Nor is it only by his Spirit
that Christ communicates with us even now; though, he is ascended again
into heaven, yet the benefits of his having become man, over and above
those of his dying and rising agai