The news of the far country

This week I finished reading Towers in the Mist, by Elizabeth Goudge, which was a particularly good one. This book features the CS Lewisian idea of the 'news of the far country', and it might possibly have been written before Lewis, so I am curious as to where that idea originated.

The context of this quote perhaps makes it more meaningful, but I thought I’d post this little excerpt for Advent:

The Christmas story itself absorbed him. Though it was so old a story, one that he had known as soon as he was capable of knowing anything, it seemed to-night quite new to him. “Glory to God in the highest … A child is born.” The old words that he had heard a hundred times over seemed cried out with the triumph of new and startling news. The figures that moved before him, Mary with the child in her arms, Joseph and the shepherds, Gabriel and the angels, Herod and the Wise Men, that he had seen so many times pictured in stained-glass windows and on the leaves of missals, moved now in this tiny space at the heart of the crowd as though they had come there for the first time … The love of God is with man … That, Nicolas knew suddenly, is the news of the far country, the mystery like a nugget of gold that men travel so far to seek, the fact that is stated but not explained by all the pictures that have been painted and by all the music and the poetry that has been written since the dawn of the world. It was as easy as that, and as difficult.