God in His World Author:Henry Mills Alden Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE INCARNATION OHOLY Night! At all times holy, being the oldest ordinance of God, the oldest symbol of the Eternal Word, before ever the sun was made—thrice-... more » Tbt holy now, overshadowing the mystery of the coming Word become flesh! Thou that veiling the earth of the ' Bridegroom. dost reveal the heavens ; thou that ever regardest Eilytheia who presideth over child-birth ; thou mother of Sleep, the nurse of all strength; thou sister of Hades, the Grave of the world, whence riseth the Lord of Light— thou hast held within thy darkness not only all shapes of fear and all ghostly portents, being thyself the likeness at once of man's ignorance and of God's mysterious permission of all that men call evil,—pain and sorrow and death,—but also all those precious things which have been hid from the foundation of the world, the treasures of the Kingdom, now for the first rime to be brought into the clear light of day and made real to the human heart by the Son of Man. Beneath thy veil, O holiest night of nights, all Nature, that hath so long sighed forth in every inarticulate breathing the voiceless Word, is thrilled with the expectancy of utterance. Thou walkest upon the earth, and thy feet are in the darkness, but above thy head all the heavenly lamps are lighted, and behold! the Bridegroom cometh ! It is, indeed, the night of the human world, whose darkness closeth all around this radiant spot in Bethlehem,scarcely conscious thereof. The grandest manifestation of merely human power and at the same time of its inherent weakness standeth, in sublime antithesis, over against the Appearing of the Lord of a new and spiritual kingdom,—the strophe in which are mingled the brazen blare of martial trumpets and the languishing strains of Sybaritic music, against the heavenly an...« less