But let no minister be terrified or intimidated by the Archbishop's unhappy experience. His 'bad time' may help us to enjoy a good one. We must take his text, and wrestle with it bravely. It is the ideal Christmas greeting. There is certainly depth and mystery; but there is humanness and tenderness as well.
'_The Word_ was made flesh.' Words are wonderful things, to say nothing of '_the_ Word'--whatever _that_ may prove to be. This selfsame Archbishop Trench, whose sermon at Cambridge proved such a universal disappointment, has written a marvellous book _On the Study of Words_. Here are seven masterly chapters to show that words are fossil poetry, and petrified history, and embalmed romance, and that all the ages have left the record of their tears and their laughter, of their virtues and their vices, of their passion and their pain, in the _words_ that they have coined. 'When I feel inclined to read poetry,' says Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'I take down _my dictionary_! The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of age. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more elegant analogy.' Words, then, are jewel-cases, treasure-chests, strong-rooms; they are repositories in which the archives of the ages are preserved.
'The Word _was made flesh_.' We never grasp the Word until it is. Let me illustrate my meaning. Here is a bonny little fellow of six, with sunny face and a glorious shock of golden hair. His father hands him his first spelling-book, with the alphabet on the front page, and little two-letter monosyllables following. But what can he make of even such small words? He will never learn the A.B.C. in that way. But give him a _teacher_. Make the word flesh, and he will soon have it all off by heart!
Five years pass away. The lad is in the full swing of his school-days now. But to-night, as he pores over his books, the once sunny face is clouded, and the wavy hair covers an aching head.
'Time for bed, sonny!' says mother at length.