Christmas Eve with the Hackney Phalanx: "the dawnings of that day"

From A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year, Volume I (1817) by Joseph Holden Pott - associated with the Hackney Phalanx - a sermon for Christmas Day, words to prepare us for the joy of celebrating the Lord's Nativity:

We are now met, according to the solemn purport of this day, to celebrate the benefits which are derived to us from our Redeemer's coming to open and fulfil the great treaty of salvation, for the succour and recovery of a fallen race. We are assembled now in order to take nearer views, and to encourage larger recollections, of the several circumstances which accompanied our Lord's Nativity, and which marked the first period of the happy season of redemption ...

To us, then, it belongs to raise many a pious meditation on those lines of the sacred narrative, to draw many a lesson from each memorable sentence of those hallowed pages, which have the seal of the divine authority impressed upon them in such living characters, and which were written so expressly "for our learning". To us it belongs to consider with delight and veneration the wonders of our merciful Redeemer's welcome birth ... 

To us, also, it belongs, to view with joy and gratitude, with humble trust and ceaseless admiration, the fruits of that event, which angels saw with wonder, and which they who hope to share with angels in their happiness, must celebrate with their perpetual praises. Cold indeed must be that heart which does not glow when such subjects form the proper and peculiar themes of recollection and rejoicing; when we are invited to look back to the dawnings of that day, in the brightness of which we walk to this hour; that day which knows no failure or declension; that sun which shall never hasten to go down.