"It Shall Come to Pass"

The big man in the rumpled suit scratched his pen steadily across the large white sheets. In the stillness of the Oval Room the two flags hung limp on the mahogany standards; blue smoke from his burning cigaret wavered up from the silver tray. On his desk were newspapers, staring headlines of bombings and battles; and a Bible, open at Isaiah.

"Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it. . . ."

The big man wrote on. Through the ceiling-high window, framing the long roll of grass, tired-green now with winter, came the faint honks of the cabs, rolling shoppers home with Christmas packages. Thousands of miles away, helmeted men squinted through bombsights; homeless families trudged despairingly through the snow.

"Come now, and let its reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. . . ."

The big man's face, rocklike when he is intent, the mouth sad and downbitten when he isn't smiling, bent steadily over the pages scrawled in his bold vertical hand.

Then he pressed a buzzer—the one that goes off like a small bomb under Steve Early's desk. Down the colonnade that is called the President's Walk, past the swimming pool and up the elevator, there awaited him a highball, a Christmas tree shiny with colored balls and tinsel, two soap-smelling, be-diapered grandsons—warmth and relief from the crushing responsibility, the solemn loneliness that is a U. S. President's when he has to make a momentous decision.

To a gaunt, dark-eyed man in a skullcap and ermine-trimmed robe, Franklin Roosevelt had written a letter for Christmas, remembering perhaps how that man's long pale hands had twisted with painful earnestness when they talked together of world peace three years ago.

To Pope Pius XII, Mr. Roosevelt wrote: "I take heart in remembering that in a similar time, Isaiah first prophesied the birth of Christ. Then, several centuries before His coming, the condition of the world was not unlike that which we see today. Then, as now, a conflagration had been set; and nations walked dangerously in the light of the fires they had themselves kindled.

"But in that very moment, a spiritual rebirth was foreseen,—a new day which was to loose the captives and to consume the conquerors in the fire of their own kindling; and those who had taken the sword were to perish by the sword. . . .

"In their hearts men decline to accept for long the law of destruction forced upon them by wielders of brute force. Always they seek, sometimes in silence, to find again the faith without which the welfare of nations and the peace of the world cannot be rebuilt.

"I have the rare privilege of reading the letters and confidences of thousands of humble people, living in scores of different nations. ... I know that these, and uncounted numbers like them in every country, are looking for a guiding light. We remember that the Christmas star was first seen by shepherds in the hills, long before the leaders knew. . . .