e thought of the bitter cold to
which the great Little One lay exposed in the rough stable, with the
contrast between the cold and darkness of the night and the fire of love
veiled beneath that infant form. _Lux in tenebris_ is one of the
strongest notes of Christmas: in the bleak midwinter a light shines
through the darkness; when all is cold and gloom, the sky bursts into
splendour, and in the dark cave is born the Light of the World.

There is the idea of royalty too, with all it stands for of colour and
magnificence, though not so much in literature as in painting is this
side of the Christmas story represented. The Epiphany is the great
opportunity for imaginative development of the regal idea. Then is seen
the union of utter poverty with highest kingship; the monarchs of the
East come to bow before the humble Infant for whom the world has found no
room in the inn. How suggestive by their long, slow syllables are the
Italian names of the Magi. Gasparre, Baldassarre, Melchiorre--we picture
Oriental monarchs in robes mysteriously gorgeous, wrought with strange
patterns, heavy with gold and precious stones. With slow processional
motion they advance, bearing to the King of Kings their symbolic gifts,
gold for His crowning, incense for His worship, myrrh for His mortality,
and with them come the mystery, colour, and perfume of the East, the
occult wisdom which bows itself before the revelation in the Child.

Above all, as the foregoing pages have shown, it is the _childhood_ of
the Redeemer that has won the heart of Europe for Christmas; it is the
appeal to the parental instinct, the love for the tender, weak, helpless,
yet all-potential babe, that has given the Church's festival its
strongest hold. And this side of Christmas is penetrated often by the
_mystical spirit_--that sense of the Infinite in the finite without which
the highest human life is impossible.

|157| The feeling for Christmas varies from mere delight in the Christ
Child as a representative symbol on which to lavish affection, as a child
delights in a doll, to the mystical philosophy of Eckhart, in whose
Christmas sermons the Nativity is viewed as a type of the Birth of God in
the depths of man's being. Yet even the least spiritual forms of the cult
of the Child are seldom without some hint of the supersensual, the
Infinite, and even in Eckhart there is a love of concrete symbolism.
Christmas stands peculiarly for the sacramental principle that the