We were once that poor man. But gradually we have frittered our freedom away: always increasing our wants, little by little making more and more necessities for ourselves; forming habit after habit of petty indulgence; until one day (if we are given the grace of realising it), we discover that we too have lost the Divine Child. The lyrical young Christ that was the youth of our soul has gone away, leaving us a dyspeptic old man, lonely in a cluttered room of his own making, a forgotten invalid sitting in a timeless twilight of mediocrity.
