Puer natus, consummatum est
Good Lord, deliver us.
From the Litany.
Though therefore the days of the martyrs, which are for our example celebrated in the Christian church, be ordinarily called natalitia martyrum, the birth-day of the martyrs, yet that is not intended of their birth in this world, but of their birth in the next; when by death their souls were new delivered of their prisons here, and they newly born into the kingdom of heaven; that day, upon that reason, the day of their death, was called their birth-day, and celebrated in the church by that name.
Only to Christ Jesus, the fulness of time was at his birth; not because he also had not a painful life to pass through, but because the work of our redemption was an entire work, and all that Christ said, or did, or suffered, concurred to our salvation, as well his mother's swathing him in little clouts, as Joseph's shrouding him in a funeral sheet; as well his cold lying in tho manger, as his cold dying upon the cross; as well the puer natus, as the consummatum est; as well his birth, as his death, is said to have been the fulness of time.
From a sermon of John Donne, preached on Christmas Day, 1625.
(The illustration is a watercolour by Edward Burne-Jones, 'The Nativity'.)
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