Excerpt from Time Flies: A Reading Diary Mother Church who opens the ecclesiastical year for her children with the alarum of Advent, Opens for them the civil year with a Divine example of self denial. For whatever Christ did or suffered for us was all, first and last, the loving choice of His own free Will. Christ met but a cold welcome into this cold world when a public inn could not take Him in; there was no room for Him, and only a stable afforded Him shelter: thus He began His natural human life. And He was but eight days old when He shed the first drops of His Blood: thus (in a sense) He began His spiritual life. His natural and His spiritual life began one with privation, the other with suffering. Let us not be too eager to lie soft and warm, or too chary of undergoing pain. Had anyone been ready to forego bed on that first Christmas Eve in favour of a poor wayfaring woman ill fitted to encounter the brunt of hardship, he also like St. Joseph would have ranked as the Lord's foster-father. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.