e Men

XV. A Frightened King

XVI. An Impotent Destroyer

XVII. Splendid Gifts

XVIII. Was a Child the Best Christmas Gift to the World?

XIX. A World Without Christmas

XX. Has the Christmas Song Survived the World War?

XXI. The Light of the World

O Little town of Bethleham,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by:
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee to-night.

--Phillips Brooks.

[Illustration: A Wonderful Night]

[Illustration: A Wonderful Night]

I. An Age of Wonders

[Transcriber's note: The first letter of each chapter is in the form of
an illustrated dropped capital.]

We live in an age of wonders. Great discoveries and startling events
crowd upon us so fast that we have scarcely recovered from the
bewildering effects of one before another comes, and we are thus kept in
a constant whirl of excitement. The heavens are full of shooting stars,
and while watching one we are distracted by another. So frequent is this
experience that our nerves almost refuse to respond to the shock of a
new sensation. We are no longer surprised at surprises. The marvelous
has become the commonplace, and the unexpected is what we now expect.

Yet we are not to suppose that our age is the only one that has had its
wonders. Other times had theirs also, only these old-time wonders have
become familiar to us and ceased to be wonderful; but in their day they
were marvelous, and some of them equalled if they did not surpass any
wonders we have witnessed. The Great War was the most cataclysmic
eruption that has ever convulsed the world, but it was not more
revolutionary and sensational in the twentieth century than the French
Revolution was in the eighteenth and the Reformation was in the
sixteenth century. The discovery of America in the fifteenth century
created immense excitement and was relatively a more colossal and
startling occurrence than anything that has happened since.

The telescope and the Copernican theory were as great achievements in
their day as the spectroscope and the nebular hypothesis are in our day.
The most useful inventions and the most marvelous products of the human
brain are not the railway and telegraph after all. The art of printing,
which infinitely multiplies thought and sows it in the very air and
every mor