good-will, and peace. This had been out of keeping with the congruity
which characterises all God's works of nature, and which will be found
equally characteristic of His works of providence and grace. As was
meet, the glad tidings of peace were announced to men who were engaged
in an eminently peaceful occupation; who passed tranquil lives amid
the quietness of the solemn hills, far removed alike from the
ambitious strife of cities and the bloody spectacles of war. Lying
amid the solitudes of the mountains, where no sounds fall on the ear
but the bleating of flocks, the lowing of cattle, the hum of bees, the
baying of a watch-dog from the lonely homestead, the murmur of hidden
rills, the everlasting rush of the waterfall as it plunges flashing
into its dark, foaming pool, pastoral are eminently peaceful scenes.
Indeed, the best emblem of peace which a great painter has been able
to present he owes to them--it is a picture of a quiet glen, with a
lamb licking the rusty lips of a dismounted gun, while the flocks
around crop the grass that waves above the slain.

Apt scholars of the devil, wicked men have used Holy Scripture to
justify the most impious crimes. Others, with more fancy than
judgment, have drawn the most absurd conclusions from its facts; but
we seem warranted to conclude, that by selecting shepherds to receive
the first tidings of Jesus' birth, apart from the circumstance that
they were Christ's own favourite types of Himself, God intended to
confer special honour on the cause, and encourage the lovers and
advocates of peace. Deer are furnished by nature with horns, dogs with
teeth, eagles with talons, serpents with poison, and bees with stings;
but men have no weapons of offence. Yet, acting under the dominion of
their lusts, men have a passion for fighting, and, easily fired with
the spirit, and dazzled with the glory of war, are ready to abandon
arguments for blows; and I cannot but think that He who would not
permit David, the man after His own heart, to build Him a house
because he had been a man of blood, conferred this honour on these
humble shepherds because they were men of peace. Whether it be with
Himself or our own consciences, in the midst of our families, among
our neighbours, or between nation and nation, He enjoins us to
cultivate peace: in His own emphatic words, we are to "seek peace and
pursue it."

VI.

THEY WERE MEN OF HUMBLE RANK.

Many in humble, as well as in more cove