Weekly Knox: Christmas

"The child who was born in Bethlehem had, for nine months, been carried in the womb at Nazareth, just like any other child; this is our guarantee that, although God, he was truly man.  God did not deceive us by taking on the mere appearance of humanity...he became man; that was the leverage, if we may put it in very crude terms, through which the work of our redemption was effected.  And, very curiously, this is one of the lessons which the Church found in particularly hard to teach.  The early heretics were not people who denied out Lord's Godhead...they were people who denied his manhood." -The Pastoral Sermons