The Portland daily press., 1882-12-23
The Christmas Festival.

The Pilgrim Fathers did not celebrate Christ
mas. 1t was not to them 'dies non," for
work to stop, and business and sport and
nothing but devotion to occur, as their idea of
HOLIDAY was. On the contrary it was a pa
gan holiday, left over from the worst faiths
and prescribed chiefly by the evil church of
Rome. On that day it behooved IL men to
work little harder than usual, AS a protest
There waslindeed no room for holiday in the
early times and faith of New England. 1t
took about 200 years for the old prejudice
against Christmas to die out, but the last half
century has left us hardly more of Puritan rig
Or than we have of Puritan hardship; our
faith Is getting to be as broad as our prosperity
and Christmas is very much at home with us.
So much at home that any allusion to its origin
and derivation in an invidious fashion is quite
surprise, and we are as ready to cry "fanat-
ic"at a religious objector as the people of
"Merrie England" were in the 18th century
and later, though we cry in rather indiffer-
ent II not contemptuous spirit, instead of per-
scouting one.
1t is not bad thing, however, to learn that
there are those who still find danger in holt
day, and are scared, not only at Giant Pope
but at Giant Pagan, as they pass the bone
sire wn caves of these bugbears of pilgrims to
the Celestial city. The brief paper in another
column reads very oddly nowadays; it issa
queer medley of ignorance and superstition,
based on the one truth that the Christian
church did utilize the feasts of the old relip-
ions it supplanted, Oriental, Roman or Morse,
by transferring them to celebrations of its own
divine founder. A very wise thing it was, too.
for it contributed no little to the contentment
OF the common people with the new faith
which had so knocked down their idols and
tIampled on their traditions. It was wise
then, and it is wise now, to keep Christmas,
seeing that there need be no misapprehepsion
as to the meaning and influence of the day. 1t
has long been held probable that the carols err in
saying that Christ was born on Christmas day."
but of what consequence is that? Christ may
have been born in April, as some contend, but
il is not his physical coming into the world
that matters, it is his spiritual advent, and to
rejoice in that needs no warrant of day and
hour; even if we had the record of that first
enrolment made when Quirinius was governor
of Syria, we should not be whit nearer him.
Nor are we farther from him because the
Romans held revel in their saturnalia and the
Morse peoples burned their Yule log at the
same season.
1t is indeed "human" festival; if it were
not human it could not be religious. That
mischievous, hideous separation of religion
from life has driven out of the Christian
church many of the brightest intellects and
made them haters of it and even of the good
that is in it. Jesus became leader and ex-
ample to his race, a far-shining light and far
reaching power, because in his person man
was shown divine. He was man who knew
God, and talked of him as son of beloved
father, and lifted all men with him to see that
God was their friend and father too. So that
his birth was new birth for humanity and
Christmas is full of humanity therefore.