THE FAMILY'S THREAT TO UTOPIA
By:  Solange Hertz

The United States of the World...
      The readers of Time magazine were assured two summers ago that "within the next hundred years...all states will recognize a single global authority."  The author of the article was Strobe Talbott, member of the CFR, former Rhodes Scholar and President Clinton's roommate at Oxford.  Mr. Talbott, who may become the next American Secretary of State, admits that "it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government," made possible by the democratic "idea that all human beings are born equal and should as citizens, enjoy certain basic Liberties and rights including that of choosing their own leaders."
      As he explains it, "once there was a universal ideology to govern the conduct of nations towards their own people it was more reasonable to imagine a compact governing nations' behavior toward one another."  Setting up the new Utopia should not prove difficult, because, says he, "All countries are basically social arrangements accommodations to changing circumstances.  No matter how permanent or even sacred they may seem at any one time in fact they are all artificial and temporary."  For solutions to incidental problems, he invites global planners to study the United States.  As prototype of modern artificial governments, he believes it is still "the best example of a multinational federal state, "To use it as a world model would be little more than "the logical extension of (its) Founding Fathers' wisdom."

Hell on earth...
      Every artificial government from Cain's city to the United Nations exhibits four distinguishing marks: It is one, human, universal and autonomous.  A Catholic has no trouble recognizing these characteristics as mirror-images of the four marks of the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.  Utopia's unity resides in a man made ideology imposed on all without distinction.  Its holiness is that of man become his own god, whereas its universality is nothing more than the fallen human nature shared by all of us.  Its apostolic authority is "the consent of the governed."
      In other words, Utopia is the official apostasy of nations, the apo-State.  It is an international anti-Church whose components have banded together against God as their common enemy.  The spirit of Utopia is perfectly expressed in Psalm 2:
      "Why have the nations raged and the people devised vain things?  The kings of the earth have stood up and the princess met together against the Lord and against his Christ.  Let us break their bonds asunder; and let us cast away their yoke from us: (ps.2:1-2).  Observing developments at the close of the First World War, Benedict XV called Utopia "the erection of atheism into a system: responsible for "hurling the world into a sea of blood."
      Its source of inspiration is not far to seek: the mission which the Church receives from above, Utopia is pleased to receive from below.  Because its designers deny the existence of the supernatural, limiting their perspective to what can be perceived to the senses, they have no defenses against the preternatural, which lies just above us between the natural and the supernatural.  Disregarding the Church God established to protect and guide governments as well as individuals, they automatically fall under the  spiritual jurisdiction of those echelons of fallen angels above who "go round about the earth and walk through it" (Job 1:7).
      By nature far superior to man, these demonic intelligences were identified by St. Paul as world rulers... the spirits of wickedness in the high places" (Eph 6:12) who labor to set up their eternal empire on earth before being confined to hell at the end of time.  there can be little double that Satan, Freemasonry's "Great Architect of the Universe," is the father of Utopia.  that he is the mastermind behind the false church and state which will challenge the Kingdom of Christ in the latter days is revealed in Scripture, under the symbolism of the Dragon and the two Beasts in chapter 13 of the Apocalypse.  Sr. Lucy of Fatima has confirmed this.
      St. Bernard believed Utopia was conceived in the mind of Satan before he was expelled from heaven and that it contributed to his fall.  In an apostrophe to the fallen angel, the saint argued, "Now you were once very close to God and in His foreknowledge...you foresaw these reprobate men shining with no ray of wisdom, burning with no flame of love and of this empty wasteland you chose to be lord to infuse into them the light of our own cunning to inflame them with your own evil desires.  The Most High God rules over the children of obedience in His love and goodness; and  you would be king of the sons of pride...and so be like the Most High.
      "But tell me for it is this which makes me wonder...did you not also see your downfall?  And if you did foresee it, what madness made you choose such wretched dignity preferring to rule in misery rather than be subject in happiness?...find it easier to believe that you did not foresee it.  Or perhaps...you looked to the goodness of God and Said to yourself: "He will not take notice."  Perhaps he was blinded by pride, presuming like some theologians today that God is too merciful to damn anybody.  St. Bernard concluded that it is quite possible to foresee the future without foreseeing all the consequences, and that Satan in fact did foresee his downfall.

The fate of the family...
      Ignoring the supernatural on principle, the builders of Utopia are likewise unaware of where they are heading.  Their public crimes nevertheless bring down punishment, and as Benedict XV predicted back in 1917, "The present calamities will not cease until the human race has returned to God."  With so much hell already now on earth, where whole nations are thrown into turmoil and disintegrating before our very eyes, the time has come to ask, "What happens to the family in such a scenario?"
      There is no mention of the family in the U.S. Constitution, nor in any others patterned on its principles, and that in itself is ominous.  With the onset of democracy, the family's juridical standing disappeared, along with that of God and His church.  Nor is there any mention of marriage, upon which the family rests as a social institution.  From the moment all men were declared equal, the family was legally replaced by the individual as basic cell and archetype of society.  In other words, family rights simply disappeared into :the Rights of Man."
      Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to assess the effects of this revolutionary development.  In "The Influence of Democracy on the Family" he wrote, "In countries which are aristocratically constituted the government never makes a direct appeal to the mass of the governed; as men are united together it is enough to lead the foremost the rest will follow.  This is applicable to the family as well as to an aristocracies that have a head.  Among aristocratic nations social institutions recognize, in truth, no one in the family but the father; children are received by society at his hands; society governs him, he governs them".
      In other words, the family was once a recognized unit of government.  "Thus the parent not only has a natural right but acquires a political right to command them he is the author and support of his family but he is also its constituted ruler.  In democracies...no such intermediate person is required; a father is there in the eye of the law only as a member of a community older and richer than his sons."
      In other words, paternity  has been swallowed up in fraternity, and hierarchy in equivalence, Husband and wife, show the old laws of Christendom regarded as one moral person in one flesh, were so no longer.  They might still disinherit their children or sanction them for misbehavior, but thereafter they did so only as individuals and not as heads of households.  they no longer arranged marriages as they once did, when uniting a man and a woman in wedlock was looked upon as a merger of two families, above and beyond that of the bride and groom, an event with consequences in which society at large had a vested interest.
      A man's first duty was no longer to his parents, but to his children.  (Scripture points out that Cain named his city after his son).  To marry without parental approval as Esau did had always been a mark of reprobation, but after the triumph of democracy parental consent and marriage itself became increasingly optional.  Even in local statutes where the family continued to figure, its membership was restricted to parents and the minor children.  Gone from the books was the old Catholic tribe whose benevolent embrace included the servants as well as the grandparents, aunts, uncles, godchildren and assorted cognates all headed by the paterfamilias responsible for everybody!  Abolished was primogeniture, for the children of course became equal along with everybody else.
      The connection between what has happened to families and what has happened to nations may not be immediately obvious, but their plight is the same and its cause is the same.  Prior to the Revolution, the family was the undisputed principle of political unity and the first school of public life.  Just as the private family bound individuals together, the nation bound families together, and empires bound national families together.  Emperors and kinds, in other words, were fathers on a larger scale, with prerogatives and duties towards their subjects little different from those of any father towards his family.  In the new egalitarian economy the family - whose unity depends on inequality - was granulated at all levels, and human society from top to bottom began losing its natural cohesion.  With family structures politically inoperative, the principle of subsidiary gradually gave way to ravenous centralization.
      The mediation which the household normally provided between the citizen and his government was effectively terminated, leaving him to face it on his own.  Even history and tradition began losing continuity, for the family supplies the same all important link between the generations that it supplies between collectivities.  Presuming to replace social hierarchies by national arrangements, Utopia is undertaking nothing less than a wholesale repeal of the natural law which underlies all created reality.

The family's Trinitarian image...
      Needless to say, it cannot succeed, for as Leo XII pointed out, "Both justice and reason forbid the destruction of that order which Divine Providence has ordained."  Man's home is a divine mystery.  Tampering with it is sacrilege, for the home is a figure on earth of the Godhead in heaven, God is one, but He is not one person.  God is a Family of three Persons, which our true home and source of all that is.  Created in that divine image, the first household in Eden has generated every human being who ever lived, along with every art, science, political system and institution mankind has ever produced, the family was there first.
      Fashioned in the Trinitarian image, the human family generates because the Godhead generates, "shall not I that make others to bring forth myself bring forth, said the Lord?  Shall I, that give generation to others be barren?"  (Is 66:9).  The human trinity - father, mother and child - are a representation of the three divine Persons who dwell as in in the Most Blessed Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  So ineffably real is this representation, that from the family there actually issued in the fullness of time, by the power of the Holy Ghost, a Holy Family whose Son was identical in Person with the Father's divine Son in the Godhead.
      From that time forth, sharing the same Son so to speak, the Family in heaven and man's family on earth became potentially one, with a mission not only temporal, but eternal.  The marriage of the divine and human natures consummated in the Sacred Humanity of Christ made human marriage a sacrament which is ordered not primarily to the propagation of the species, but to the generation of the elect.  Just as the family of man and all his works poured out in the natural home in Eden, the blessed will pour from the supernatural home in Nazareth, bringing in their wake all the imperishable works of the world to come.
      The family is therefore not only the source of the state, but the source of the Church as well, whose Mother is the Virgin Mary and whose Paterfamilias is her husband St. Joseph.  Their divine Son is the Mystical Body in all its members.  The sacrament of Marriage is unique in that, unlike the other sacraments, it is directly bound to natural law, rooted in man's nature for every time, place and eventuality.  Antedating all cultures, social systems, and the Church herself, the family owes its mandate to no secondary authority, civil or ecclesiastical, but to God himself, who blessed Adam and Eve in the beginning and gave them dominion over His works, commanding them to "Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it" (Gen. 1:28).
      These rights and duties comprised that first divine dispensation which governed the Patriarchs.  they would later be codified under the Mosaic law, and eventually super naturalized by the new law of grace, but never have they been abrogated, nor even derogated from.  The state springs from the family, and not the other way round.  The state has no more right to educate the young than it has to limit or control their procreation.  It may not perform marriages, and what God has joined together indissolubly it certainly cannot put asunder by divorce.  Any subordination of the rights of the family to those of the state is political profanation.

The Fourth Commandment a world law...
      When God put Adam in charge of creation here below, He established once and for all the basic pattern of authority for the governance of men by other men.  the pyramidal, hierarchical, monarchical rule of the father over mother and child on which the family is structured reflects the order in the Godhead.  Although co-equal and co-external, the three divine Persons, in their relations with one another, are in fact a hierarchy, a Family, where the Father is the unique and everlasting source of the other Two.  In one form or other the Divine Exemplar has reproduced its monarchical image in every empire, nation, tribe or human association the world has ever known.  Modern democracy boast of having provided a better form of government, but close examination shows it to be nothing more than a pathological, inverted mutation of the one laid down in Eden.
      Politics is first and foremost a family affair.  Patriotism is a family virtue, for our country is what Pius XII called that greater family given to us by God.  What harms the family is harmful to the nation, for there is an organic relationship between then, if only because one cannot do without the other.  Although politicians all come from families, no family is self sufficient, for it is an "imperfect" society.  To achieve its natural and supernatural ends it requires the help of those two "perfect" societies which are the Church and the state.  To function properly it must maintain close relations with both under one primordial law which governs all mankind.
      That law is the Fourth commandments, to which God subjected the whole world.  It is universally binding and prescribes hierarchical government by its very wording.  In its light to declare all men equal and source of their own authority, is blasphemy.  Jesus of Nazareth, to whom, all power in heaven and on earth has been given, reduced political science to its simplest terms when He taught us the Our Father.  "Thy kingdom come!" is the ultimate goal of hiuman government, doing the Father's will on earth, not according to dictates of human reason, but "as it is in heaven."  where the only pattern for perfect government is to be found.
      Among the Ten Commandments, which St. Augustine called "a resume' of natural law," only the Fourth one has a specific reward attached to it.  We are told to observe it "that thou mayest live a long time and it may be well with thee in the land which the Lord thy God will give thee" (Deut. 5:16).  The Catechism of the Council of Trent says this promised "not only the eternal life of the blessed but also the life which we lead on earth...not only length of days but also repose tranquility and security to live well".  In other words, that elusive "common good" sought by every political regime worthy of the name, is guaranteed by obedience of the Fourth Commandment and cannot be found outside it.
      Alongside the reward, terrible chastisement for disobedience were incurred under the old law, which Our Lord came not to destroy but to perfect, promising that not one little of it would fail (Luke 16:17).  Striking or cursing parents was punished by death, and the unruly son could be stoned. (Ex. 21:15,17: Lev. 20:9; Deut. 21:21). Proverbs says the offender's "lamp shall be put out in the midst of darkness" and the mocker's eyes picked out by ravens (20:20; 30:17).  A national family which presumes to strike down its king can expect to wallow in darkness like anyone else who raises his hand against his father.
      As Pius XI pointed out in his encyclical Quas primas on Christ the King, there is no "difference in this matter between the individual and the family and the state; for all men whether individually or collectively are under the dominion of Christ.  In Him is the salvation of the individual, in Him is the salvation of society."  Political reform is fueled by faith, not by legislation.  If there are economic problems, our Lord prescribed the same remedy to governments that He prescribed to individuals.  Instead of looking to Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes, they should ask their Father for their daily bread, for "your heavenly Father knoweth what is needful for you" (Matt. 5:6-S). "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice" (Matt. 6:33), and all real needs will be met.

Warfare against the family...
      Utopia does not threaten the family so much as the family threatens Utopia, for it recognizes the family as its irreducible natural enemy.  This is  provided by the savagery of the attack against it.  When the children of La Salette can upon our Lady sitting and weeping on the mountain, the boy Maximin said later he thought she was a mother who had been beaten by her son.  His reaction was symptomatic of how far the assault on the Forth Commandment had progressed by the year 1846.
      Bent on subordinating the family to democratic principles, the satanic forces had begun by dismantling its trinitarian structure.  Over the course of the last 200 years, father, mother and child have been systematically torn one from another.  The offensive began with the Industrial Revolution, which to all practical purposes drove the father out of the home by shifting his workplace to the factory.  With husband and wife parted for most of their waking hours, the home lost its balance.  whereas his role in the education and nature of the children was reduced to a minimum, hers was amplified to a maximum.  The home became almost exclusively a female enterprise, It became "woman's work", towards which the husband's contribution was little more than financial.
      With the father out of the house, the next step was to drive out the mother.  This was accomplished through woman suffrage, which established the same political equality between the sexes as between any other individuals.  Overnight marriage became a partnership, in which authority was shared equally.  Deadlocks once resolved by the father's authority now required third party intervention.  The Fourth Commandment no longer applied, for the husband was no longer the wife's legal superior.
      Her work at home now viewed as mindless drudgery, she began exercising her skills in the marketplace.  The competition between the sexes, which inevitably ensued, fueled feminism and outright warfare.  Homes were fragmented by working mothers who were not only parted from their children, but who now revealed their fathers as bread winners.  Once declared equal, those whom God created male and female grew maladjusted, incapable of the complementary cooperation for which they were designed by nature.
      The sacramentality of marriage had already been undermined by Calvinist reformers, who viewed it as a civil contract between partners, to be terminated like any other for just cause.  As the strains on married life increased, divorce became a normal remedy.  Because the family rests on marriage as its foundation, to which it owes its status as an institution, divorce strikes a mortal blow at the trinitarian image, for baptized partners the consequences are incalculable, for Christian marriage underlies for more than society.  According to St. Paul it is the "Great Sacrament" signifying the union of Christ and His Church which produces the Communion of Saints.  The Church herself is built on Marriage.
      To catalogue the destructive forces aimed at the family would be tedious.  Suffice it to say that legalized contraception both natural and unnatural, abortion and euthanasia, all ably promoted by deceptive overpopulation propaganda, are releasing both men and women form the very purpose of their existence.  The large family is already a rarity, economically penalized as it is by tax laws, housing shortages, educational and medical expenses and severe restrictions on transmitting its property from one generation to the next.  It goes without saying that Utopia , which tolerates the family only for its social utility, looks forward in the near future to sterilizing or eliminating any members judged defective, for they have no place in a planned society.  As far back as 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes upheld involuntary sterilization in a Virginia case, Buck vs. Bell.
     
Child emancipation...
      The wife having been liberated from her husband, all that remains is to liberate the child from his parents in order to obliterate the family's trinitarian image completely.  No longer part of the domestic work force once directed by his father, the child after the Industrial Revolution had to be protected from exploitation by child labor laws.  These served to diminish parental authority even more and ended by contributing to delinquency.  With teaching long gone from the home, elementary education had to be supplied by outsiders.  A unique new system of compulsory public schools, first developed in the United States as part of the secular experiment, and adopted by Napoleon in 1808, proved a potent instrument for imbuing the child with the democratic ideals for freedom and equality.  Outside school hours, extracurricular "character training" offered by the Boy Scouts, the YMCA or trained professionals added the finishing touches.
      First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a foremost feminist, is a successful lawyer who has consistently championed "children's rights".  Until 1992 she was active in the Children's Defense Fund, an organization promoting heavily-regulated government programs for children.  In the article for The American Spectator back in 1979 she argued, "Decisions about motherhood and abortion schooling, cosmetic surgery treatment of venereal disease or employment and others where the decision or luck of one will significantly affect the child's future should not be made unilaterally by parents.  Children should be permitted to decide their own future if they are competent."
      In 1989 the United Nation's General Assembly called an international summit conference on "The Rights of the Child."  Inasmuch as children have already been allowed to sue their parents for "divorce", it would seem that the Fourth Commandment will soon apply no more to children than it does to wives.  Even now children by law are withdrawn from parental control when they attain their legal majority, in many nations at age 18. Whatever rights may be determined for the child, however, it should be noted that unequivocal right to life is not one of them, for at the international level his mother's right to kill him before birth remains unchallenged.
      this leads us to suspect that the child the U.N. has in mind is not the one God created to love and serve Him in this world and be happy with Him in the next.  As Jean de Viguerie pointed out in an address delivered at the time, "The child used to have a soul and he knew it; he was at the center of the universe, and he knew it; there was an invisible world and he knew it.  For this child materialistic anthropology has substituted another child who doesn't exist, but who we pretend does exist a child who is only a piece of the "Great All:, a child ruled only by physical laws, a child inert and formless, a child who does not grow in wisdom but by satisfying his appetites...being only a portion of matter, he can be fashioned into anything one likes...the dream of creating man by modifying the child."

The artificial family...
      This year of our Lord 1994 the United Nations has set aside as "The Year of the Family", and here again, we have reason to believe that the family in question is not the traditional one, for it was referred to officially as "the smallest democracy at the heart of society".  Last December U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared, "There is no single definition of the family or any one model.  We celebrate the family under all its social and cultural forms".  A preparatory document stated, "The image of the ideal family varies considerable from one country to another as it does within one country.  Family political policies should endeavor to avoid favoring either implicitly or explicitly one single ideal image of the family."
      So much for God's little trinity on earth.  In American in 1776 the forces of Utopia proclaimed a new order of the ages, designed to replace God's government by one of those "social arrangements: Strobe Talbott called "artificial and temporary."  With these now proliferating all over the world, why not artificial families?  As Leon Trotsky put it, "The family can't be abolished it must be replaced."  Soon any transitory association of individuals can be expected to qualify as a family under the law.  As one Catholic authority commented, 'According to the document nothing prevents a homosexual couple from being considered as a family."  Even now homosexual couples, as individuals, are legally permitted to adopt children.
      According to a couple of sociologists, the time has come to acknowledge that the traditional family's obsolete and can no longer justify its existence.  "The family was once a state, "They argue," ...sometimes a workshop.  The family is still a hotel but it is fast losing this function...as it has already lost its pedagogical function.  the family is no longer a school hardly still a nursery.  All the needs it might fulfill being now satisfied by outside society all its members should leave."
      Until now biological necessity protected the family from total extinction, the state having no other way of producing citizens, but with the development of biogenetic, in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and all the other techniques of human engineering, the family is being attacked not only at the theological root it shares with God in heaven, but even at the biological root it shares with the animals on earth.  The horrors of artificial contraception are now matched by the horrors of artificial contraception.    
      Couples experiencing difficulty with natural procreation may routinely resort to medically assisted conception through implantation, a kind of biological adultery to which the doctor becomes an active third party.  As for those free and equal individuals eager to produce offspring "born...of blood the will of the flesh and the will of man" (John 1:13),  the laboratory promised "designer children" hatched from genetically modified, frozen embryos to suit every taste.  In an economy of artificial nations and artificial families, why not artificial people?  Is the alchemist's age-old dream of the man made homunculus about to come true?
      A curious detail occurs in St. Hildegard of Bingen's prophecies of the Antichrist.  She says that his mother will be "an impious woman who from her infancy will have been initiated in profane sciences and all the artifices of the devil and that "she will conceive this son of perdition without knowing who is the father."  It is possible the Antichrist will originate as an embryo produced in the laboratory with the help of Satan?  Could godless genetic research actually be ordered to some satanic pseudo-Incarnation?
      Whatever God permits, to dream of creating a new family in its own image is Utopian madness by definition, for it means manufacturing an entirely new order of reality.  by the very nature of God's creation, the family poses the ultimate political threat to Utopia.  As Benedict XV said, "As the family constitutes the foundation of the human race" to revitalize it would result not only in the correction of private morals, but in "the restoration of public and civil institutions," Christ's enemies know this.
     the family has little to fear from anarchy r chaos, in the course of which natural structures reassert themselves automatically with a vengeance.  What is reducing the family to its present straits is not confusion, but the calculated cunning of those who will not acknowledge Jesus Christ.  They can reduce it to near extinction, but the gates of hell will never prevail against it, for like the church, the family is of divine institution.  Due proportion kept, even in the natural order it is one, universal and apostolic.  where the Christian family is concerned, these marks are so evident that St. John Chrysostom actually called it the ecclessia, the Church in miniature.  What affects the one affects the other, for they are one, and their enemies are the same.

The Family's Infant King...
      In his beautiful prophecy of the final coming of God's kingdom, when the families of nations are finally gathered together in peace and harmony, Isaiah says, "A little child shall lead them (RS. 11:E).  That little Child can be no other than Christ the Kings.  It was not as the accused victim in Pilate's court in Jerusalem that He first proclaimed Him kingship, but as the Holy Infant born to the family of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem.  It was in a private home that He first accepted homage from the kings of this world, who offered Him god, frankincense and myrrh.  The first Precious Blood He shed for the Redemption of mankind was not from the Roman scourging, nor the Crown of Thorns, but as a helpless Infant subject to the rite of Circumcision.
      Anticipating the Holy Sacrifice, He was brought to the Temple to be offered to His Eternal Father, not by the clergy or civil authorities, but by His earthly parents.  When Herod sought to kill Him by slaughtering the children of Bethlehem, He was saved by His parents.  By submitting to their authority throughout His life on earth, Jesus Christ confirmed the validity of the Fourth Commandment as the universal rule of human government.  Scripture says, "He went down with them...and was subject to them" (Luke 2:51), until the age of thirty!
      If Christ be Lord and Ruler of nations, the Holy Child is most properly King of the Family.  About 300 years before Pious XI promulgated the Feast of Christ the King, our Lord appeared royally attired in His Infant Majesty to a French Carmelite nun, Venerable Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament and told her, "My daughter draw from the treasures of My childhood."  At about the same time He appeared as Child-King of Prague, where he promised the Carmelite friar Fr. Cyril, "The more you honor Me the more I will bless you."
      The miraculous image, now commonly referred to as the Infant of Prague, should therefore reign in every home.  Crowned with the imperial diadem, vested in royal robes and holding the globe of the world in His left hand, the "little King of Glory" raises His right hand in perpetual benediction over those who acknowledge His rule.  To whom can the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic family be more safely confided than the almighty kingship of its own Divine child, the Only-Begotten Son of the Trinitarian Family in heaven and the Holy Family on earth, in whose Person the divine and human natures are indissolubly joined.
      This Child is the same Christ who told Pilate, "I am a King" (John 18:37), and who now, sitting at the right hand of the Father Almighty, will come again to judge the living and the dead.  The same Sacred Heart beats in His breast as when He promised the world through St. Margaret Mary, "I will reign despite Satan and all Opposition!"  Can His Kingship begin anywhere but where He himself began it?  The family of nations will find Him exactly where the kings of the east found Him, "in the house...with Mary His Mother!"  And like the kings, they will "open their treasures" and "offer Him gifts" once they have "fallen down and adored Him." (Matt. 2:11). XIX