14 How the Church Has Changed the World peacocks in a cage. They forget to be great, and seem as if they had returned to childhood themselves, their eyes bright with delight and their lips parted in that happy look that children have when they are all wonder and no self. For the whole world, from the stars above to the rock beneath their feet, is a grotto for just this moment, to which the people have been invited, if they would but bow their heads and become small enough to fit into the universe. The Evangelists tell us that the earth shook on the day when Christ died upon the cross. But that was the great after-tremor of Jesus’ first act of love, when in the silence of Mary’s house he became flesh and dwelt among us, and then, on the night of the Nativity, first showed to Mary and Joseph, then to the humble animals, and only then to mere shepherds, his sacred face.The earth shookwith the fire of love, and from that day unto this, wherever men and women still remember the name of Jesus and how he was born in a lowly stable, they will feel that tremor, and know, somehow, even if they have forgotten the words, that the meek shall inherit the earth, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and that all the pomp and glamour of the world will pass away, all its capitols and senates and universities and towering dynamos of business leave not one scorched stone upon a stone, but the Child born in the manger will remain, and he alone can tell us the secret of who we are and where we must go
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