ion for eternity.
Other foundation for peace can no man lay or has laid than the
acceptance of the salvation offered in Jesus Christ. He is our peace;
and when we discover that, He makes peace in us by the application to
our souls of the Blood of His Cross. This is the peace He came to bring.
This the peace that the angels announced as they sang over Bethlehem.
This is the peace which is ceaselessly proclaimed from the altars of the
Christian Church, the peace of God which passeth understanding, the
peace which is offered to all men of good will.

How shall we attain it? By being men of good will, plainly. But what
constitutes good will in a man? That which I have already discussed,
perhaps abundantly, simplicity and childlike obedience of character. S.
Joseph, the guardian of Mary and her Child here in Bethlehem, is the
best example we can have of a man of good will, a man who under the most
difficult circumstances responded with perfect readiness and complete
obedience to the heavenly message that came to him. This is to be his
course through the few years that he will live, to give himself to the
will of God in the care of Jesus. We are men of good will if we do
whatsoever our Lord says to us, if we are seeking first of all the
Kingdom of God and its righteousness, if our estimate of values
corresponds to our Lord's.

There is our trouble--that old trouble of feebly trying to live the life
of the Kingdom when what we actually want is the offer of this world.
There is, there can be, no peace in a divided life. There is a certain
spiritual sloth which has the exterior look of peace, as a corpse looks
peaceful, but it has no relation to the peace which God gives. It is in
fact the wages of sin, wages easily earned and long enjoyed. But so long
as we are spiritually alive, so long we cannot enjoy whole-heartedly
even the most fascinating of sins because there is lurking in the
background the sense of the transitoriness of our sin and of the
imminence of death and judgment. There is the skeleton in every man's
closet until he finally makes choice on one side or the other. For we
are not ignorant of the spiritual obligations of life. We always know
more than we have achieved. When we talk about our ignorance and
perplexity, we are not meaning ignorance and perplexity about the
obligation to live in a certain way, and to perform certain duties, on
this particular day: rather we are making this alleged ignorance of the
fut