New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1875-11-24
THE COMING FEAST.

THE COMING FEAST.
Thanksgiving Day is without doubt beau
tiful national observance. Nothing can be
more touching than to see a whole people,
from sea to sea, bent in gratitude before God
upon one day in the year, provided we are
sure that they do not stand upright for the
other three hundred and sixty-four Nothing
can he more significant of our generous hos
pitality than the crowded, abundant dinner
tables of wel-to-dO people, provided we know
that they first helped to fill the tables of their
poorer neighbors. There are many good
genuine people for whom tomorrow will be
the elimination of q whole years quiet thank
full recognition of n good God and His ways !;
but there are many more well-meanng folk
who will be Weakened by the Thanksgiving
sermon to the fact that this world is not
altogether a vale of tears and misery wherein
they can scarcely be saved, and that there Is
cause for at least twelve hours rejoicing, If
only on account of the crops. On this bilious,
Responding, weeping majority, Thanksgiving
Day can have but little lasting, wholesome
effect Ii will be very much like the ancient
Mothering Day kept by the country folk in
bluff Harry's time, when the adult children,
each sent to their mother Simnel cake in
token of gratitude for her care of them.
cake laid once a year on the altar of flial af-
lection does not count for much ; and neither
does turkey or plum pudding, which we
take care to eat ourselves.
We would be very far from disparaging the
Observance of Thanksgiving or doubling its
healthy and ennobling influence. 1t is some
thing that children, even by release from
school or by good dinner, should be led to
remember their Creator joyfully and with a
sense of actual, tangible blessing conferred.
Ii is much that clergymen and their fOcks OF
Christian people all over the country should
be led for an hour or two at least to think,
not of their little duties done or left undOne,
hut solely of HIS goodness and glory, and to
thank Him and be glad in both. We
only doubt the force and effect of a graf
itude and rejoicing shut into twenty
four hours of the year, while the
rest is given up to indifference,
10 anxiety, or at best to dull patient sub
mission to the will of God. Bring into New
York a Hindoo fakir, or any other consistent
pagan who lives up to his idea of his god, and
tell him that we believe and trust i'll an all
mercifu all-wise Father who guides even the
sparrow's fall and controls every event of our
lives for good, and how shall we prove ii ? In
all the world he will not find a more I'M
smiling, anxious people, men or women less will
ling to find occasion to rejoice 0r.be content and
happy. Eitherwe do not believe that the God who
ndeIles nature and our lives is good and pow
erful, or we take especial pains not to allow
orr belief 10 influence IT'S. The man who be-
lieyes he has fond wife and happy children
carries his faith in his face and actions IN and
out of his home; the man who is certain that
he has a vast fortune, securely invested, lives
easily, spends his income without fear. But
we who build our earthly and eternal life on
the certainty of infinite tenderness and love go
up and down breathless with care about to-
monow's bread, and gloomy as though life was
long funeral.
The usual argument in favor of our lugubri-
ous habit is that it is purely a matter of tenn
permanent, inherited as we inherit our national
neuralgia. or inefficient liyers. There is no
force whatever in the assertion. The AmeIi-
can is not a descendant only of the sOur-tem-
pered Puritan or the phlegmatic Englishman of
any creed. He il German, French, Scotch, with
an almost inevitable dash of red Irish blood. 1t
is the habit of gloom and anxiety which
he has inherited, not the nature, and
like every other habit it can be
conquered at will. Carkcr, across the way,
will go to church Tomorrow and warn his
boys in the grace at the dinner table that they
ought to he thankful to God who has kept the
country from civil war and spared the lives
of the family. On Friday he will get up and
90 about silent, dull, morOse. Not joke at
the breakfast table, not smile for wife and
boys OF his friends on the street. They have
none for him. There is no earthly reason for
his care-worn melancholy except that his father
and grandfather before him carried it dead
weight on them through life. Old Johns, his
bookkeeper, with 1.-THE of his worldly goods,
comes to his work hearty and cheerful, with a
rose in his button-hole and IA laugh i'll his eye,
AS BELTS "a man who has strength to work, a
good wife at home, dollar to spare for a
friend and God overhead to take care of the
rest people in his home, Office, the very street
car brighten mp a. be comes in, as if a gust of
CHEEKY wind had met them. Carker would give