In 1809 the world was following with bated breath the march of Napoleon and waiting with feverish impatience for the latest war news. And all the while, in their own homes, babies were being born.

During that year, William Gladstone was born in Liverpool, Alfred Tennyson in Somersby, Oliver Wendell Holmes in Massachusetts, Felix Mendelssohn in Hamburg and Abraham Lincoln in Kentucky.

Viewing that age in a perspective the years enable us to command, we may well ask which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809.

- My Christmas Book (Zondervan)Reader’s Digest, January, 1996, p. 178