Christmas ~ Selected Reading (Athanasius)

“For as, when a portrait painted on a panel has disappeared in consequence of eternal stains, there is need of Him to come whose the portrait is, that the likeness may be renewed on the same material; because for the sake of His picture the material itself on which it has been painted is not thrown away, but the likeness is retraced upon it: so similarly, the All-holy Son of the Father, being the image of the Father, came into our sphere to renew man made after Himself, and to find him as one lost, through the remission of sins; the which He Himself says in the Gospels: ‘I came to seek and to save that which was lost.’ Wherefore also He said to the Jews: ‘Except a man be born anew;’ not signifying, as they understood Him, the birth from women, but meaning the soul regenerated and re-created in the image of God.”
 
~Excerpt from On the Incarnation of the Word of God
by Athanasius