chapter

IN THE STAGE AT BETHLEHEM

01KFXVAZJDPS9B5VCDDW6TFGQA

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description: # IN THE STAGE AT BETHLEHEM ## Overview This entity is a digital chapter titled "IN THE STAGE AT BETHLEHEM," extracted from a larger text document. It spans lines 942 to 978 of the source file and corresponds to pages 146–153 of the original scanned material. The chapter is part of the collection [More Classics](arke:01KFXT0KM64XT6K8W52TDEE0YS), which includes works from the Western literary and religious canon. The content is a reflective Christian devotional piece that interprets the Nativity story through a social and theological lens, emphasizing humility, divine identification with the poor, and the intrinsic worth of children regardless of material circumstances. ## Context The chapter originates from a digitized text processed through an automated workflow involving OCR, structure extraction, and metadata tagging. It was extracted by the system user [Structure Extraction](arke:01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H) and is preserved within the [More Classics](arke:01KFXT0KM64XT6K8W52TDEE0YS) collection, curated under the ownership of user "Nick." The collection includes multiple religious and moral texts, suggesting this chapter is part of a broader anthology of inspirational or educational material. ## Contents The chapter reflects on the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, imagining the Holy Family being turned away from comfortable accommodations and forced to stay in a barn due to overcrowding. It critiques the idea of divine privilege, arguing that God’s choice of a humble manger for Jesus’ birth underscores a spiritual truth: a child’s value lies in their being, not their material surroundings. The author draws a parallel to modern times by referencing a visit to the Babies’ Ward at Postgraduate Medical Hospital in New York City, where impoverished children are cared for with dignity and love. The passage concludes with the assertion that even the lowliest setting can shelter the most sacred—exemplified by Christ, the “dearest of God's little ones,” born in obscurity. The chapter ends with the attribution “Margaret E. Sanger,” though this may be an error, as Sanger was a birth control activist and not known for religious writings of this nature.
description_generated_at: 2026-01-26T19:10:58.386Z
description_model: Qwen/Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507
description_title: IN THE STAGE AT BETHLEHEM
end_line: 978
extracted_at: 2026-01-26T19:08:53.935Z
extracted_by: structure-extraction-lambda
source_file: 01KFXVA454RTKCJEQJMP0QKNKY
start_line: 942
text: 653 IN THE STAGE AT BETHLEHEM 654 655 ![img-0.jpeg](arke:01KFXV8R3AYAV9KJNGS4M6RH0F)  656 .  657 133 658 659 family out of the first story front in the hotel, and put us in there? What's the use in having God for a father if He is not going to send on a courier in advance to let people know who is coming, and make sure that we will be attended to, and have some of the best of everything?” So when they came to the Bethlehem House, or whatever the hotel was called, on account of the crowd, they had, perhaps, to stand up in a line and take their turn as places were assigned, and as all the desirable rooms had been given out before Joseph and Mary's turn came, the only thing left them was to go to the barn, and give their little God-boy a horse-crib for a cradle. 660 661 Now certainly one object that God had in sending His Son away from home, putting Him down here on the earth for a few years, letting Him fare exactly as other boys and girls had to fare, giving Him no “push,” but making Him take His chances, was to show us that it is the boy and girl that God thinks of, and not  662 134 663 664 the fineness of the clothes they wear, the amount of money they have to spend, or the sumptuousness of the house in which they live. It is not that God objects to fine houses; we can see from the wonderful beauty of this world which God has made how much He thinks of beautiful things; but by giving His Son Jesus only plain clothes to wear, and only an ordinary house to occupy, and a cheap shed to be born in, He shows us that it is always the boy He thinks of first, and not the sumptuous dwelling that the boy has his home in; the baby that He thinks of first, and not the fancy cradle that the baby is rocked in. 665 666 It was only a few days ago that I went through the Babies’ Ward of the Postgraduate Medical Hospital, on East Twentieth Street, New York City. The sick children that are gathered there are drawn from some of the poorest and most hopeless homes in town; but all these little ones had been nicely washed, tastily dressed, the wards in which they were  667 135 668 gathered as neatly furnished, and the little cribs in which they were lying as cleanly and tidy in their arrangement as any that could be found in our best homes; and the consequence of it all was that the poor little waifs looked exactly as sweet and lovable as any that you could discover in the most palatial residences along our main avenues. God would teach us, then, by such cases as these, and especially by the case of His own Son, our Lord, born of poor parents in a cheap little house, that the worth of boys or girls is something entirely apart from the kind of clothes they wear, or the style of house in which they live; that the worth of a child is what the child is, not what the child has; that a diamond is still a diamond though its brightness be hidden or soiled, and that the humble roof and the lowly manger may nevertheless shelter the dearest of God's little ones—His own Holy Child, our Saviour.  669 ^{}[]  670 "Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me" 671 672 Margaret E. Sanger.  673 ^{}[]
title: IN THE STAGE AT BETHLEHEM

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Version: 2
Created: 1/26/2026
Updated: 1/26/2026
Edited by: Description Service