The birth of our Lord, like His resurrection, is inseparably bound up for the mind of Christendom with the manifestations which followed it. It is for the most part in the presence of the shepherds of Judah and the Magian pilgrims from the East that the Holy Babe presents Himself to our inward eye. For many of us, in this even more than in other parts of Biblical history, our impressions have been unconsciously formed by pictures. The shepherds on the one side, the three kings from the East on the other, united in adoration of the newly-born Child in the midst, are constant elements of a variously represented scene, familiar to us through the devotion or the skill of several generations of painters. The conception which we have derived from this imaginative combination of incidents historically distinct is essentially a true one. Each of the two evangelists who record the Nativity associates it in the closest manner with one of these two manifestations; and again it is only when the two events are brought together that their full significance becomes apparent.