SOON we will be celebrating, for the two thousandeth and first time, the birth, or first coming, of Christ. The gift of God, why did He come?

So that "all who believe in Him (God) shall not perish but have everlasting life,'' as the Gospel of St John puts it. That has always seemed to me a somewhat self-centred reason for believing in God.

The broader view is that he came to save the world. The angel of the Lord, who appeared to the shepherds, promised "peace on earth, goodwill to all men.''

Why God sent his only son at that particular time is a question rarely asked. Was the world, or rather the human race, in such a debased condition that divine intervention was imperative?

There's nothing to suggest that the world was much different from what it always had been. The human race had been in existence for thousands of years. The one or two prehistoric tribes that still miraculously survive today, going about their business with a simple dignity that puts much of our so-called civilisation to shame, are living proof that Christianity wasn't, and isn't, a pre-requisite to a humane society.

But if Christ's coming wasn't triggered by anything we can identify as a nadir in the human story, what circumstance might impel God to show his hand, openly, again? What would bring a return of that Christmas "Angel of the Lord"? Persecutions large and small throughout history, culminating in six million dead in the Holocaust, haven't done it. Two world wars, including the hydrogen bomb, haven't done it.

And now, two thousand years after Christ came to save us, the most bloodthirsty barbarism is taking place at the very spot where he was born. The holy sites are at the heart of the violence, in which prayers are a prelude to killing. Surely, if ever there was a moment for God unequivocally to manifest Himself then this must be it.

But of course God or his angel, or his son, hasn't appeared, and never will. On Radio 4's Morning Service last Sunday, the minister delivered a sermon which attempted to deal with the violence in Jerusalem. His message was that "through God all things are possible". He actually said we could be "confident'' if we gave ourselves to Him.

How can anyone believe this when, 2000 years after God sacrificed his son to achieve universal harmony, hatred between people has brought the most hideous spilling of blood - where Christendom began and by people who believe passionately that they have "given themselves to God".

AN INTERESTING fact about the old age pension has just caught my eye. While it is often stated how much higher the pension would be if it had been increased in line with earnings since the link was severed by Margaret Thatcher in 1980 - £35 more for a couple, £25 for a single person - I've never previously seen a calculation of what the pension would be if it had been tied merely to inflation since it was introduced in 1908. Worked out by the Greater London Pensioners' Association, the startling figure is - £15. And if that doesn't complete a cast-iron case for restoring the earnings link, nothing will.

I TRUST that many readers are now enjoying The Northern Echo's Stockton and Darlington Railway Centenary Supplement, republished to mark the S&DR's 175th anniversary. Among the many out-of-the-way but worth-knowing facts in this splendid publication is the revelation that the decision to build a railway, rather than a canal, was due to a forgotten figure, George Overton. The line's first engineer, he advised the directors that "whereas a canal conveys goods with the same facility upwards or downwards, a railway conveys them with more facilty downwards''. Since most S&DR traffic - coal to Stockton - was to be downwards, this clinched it for the railway. But it is Overton's successor, George Stephenson, who enjoys all the glory.