Frostburg mining journal., 1883-12-22
What We Owe to Christmas.

Bh mhS. lie y. hulbHToN.
The birthday of Christendom is Of all festi-
walls the most fitting for us to celebrate, who
owe our very existence as nation to Christi
anity. Whatever may be the views of indi-
viduals as to the person and mission OF the
Man whose birth the day commentaries all
are agreed that to His work and teaching the
ideas of humanity of liberty, of truth and
duty and self-sacrifice, in Their grand COM
pie eness may distinctly be traced-those ideas
to which we Americans directly owe it that we
are now a people. Not accident, not greed,
not lust of conquest hot love of power, not
one of all the motives which in the former his
tory of the world have led to the upbuilding
of new nations, was the moving Impulse in the
plantingofa colony on that bleak shore where,
with all due regard to the importance of other
settlements, it is still fair to say the living
germ Of our national life unfoded itself to the
light. Not one of these, but just those grand
ideas of brotherhood and liberty and duty
which we can trace back to the life which be-
gan at Bethlehem, on Christmas Day Back
to that life, but not further. All the brilliant
culture and high civilization of the an'e-
Christian world had been inadequate to the
discovery of the great truth of universal
broth rhood. To the Greek and Roman the
whole outside world were barbarans to the
Eastern nations they were almost less than hui
man-mere instruments of power, or avaricc,
or luxury; to the jew they were Gentiles,
''ble peoples, Une CutNtut, Wlllle HIS own Hu-
ton alone was the people. But from the midst
of this nairowest and most sublmely bigoted
race the world has known, in the time of its
deepest humiliation and therefore of its
closest conservatism, arose Man to whom the
love of abstract humanity was an enthusiasm,
self-sacriice an exquisite delight doing good
personal, physical g0od-to others, His meat
and drink; Man to whose broad vision truth
and liberty were interchangeable terms In
the eighteen centuries which have passed since
then, the alterations of that grand idea have
been many and great, indeed; men calling
themselves the disciples of Him who spent His
| life in doing good to the bodies of men, have
| yet despised their own Lodies and tortured
| those of others; in the very name of Him who
proclaimed liberty to the captive, and the
br, aking of every yoke, men have enslaved
| their fellow-men; the doctrines of Him whom
| they still called the Prince of Peace they have
| sought to spread by fire and sword; calling
themselves the followers of tie Man of Sor-
rows, they have led joyous and yoluptuous
| lives; they have bound in chains and fetters
| that truth which He declared was to make
them iree and yet truth and humanity, and
justice and liberty, and self-sac fice, are still,
and ever more and more the powers which
move the world.
1t is idle to assert that these ideas are but
| the natural evolution of the intelligence of
mankind-that the Prophet of Nazareth was
| only one In long line OF exceptional thinkers,
SO long as each new discovery in the world of
thought, however slowly and painfully made,
finds itself distinctly mirrored in His teach
ings. 1t would be hard to say what phase of
all our modern thought cannot be--nay, has
not been-traced back, in its germ at least, to
His words; which one of all our efforts for
the amelioration of society, for the temporal
salvation of mankind we do not owe to the
| light of Christianity npon the world. Where
among the most advanced of non-Christian
nations do we find such societies, for instance,
as those of prevention of cruelty to animals
and to children, or even the ideas which would
make them comprehensive? Where do we
find efforts made for the reformation of
criminals-for the restoration of the fallen
Where so noble and utterly self-sacrificing an
institution as our life-saying service? Where
the devotion, in short, of all the highest and
most acute thought to the practical welfare of
men, but among those nations to whom the
enthusiasm of humanity" was legacy from
One who, the first of all mankind, gave Him.
SELF living and dying, for the good of men?
Let our celebration of Christmastide, there
fore, be glad and hearty, generous and full OF
bounty to the suffering, "a day of gladness
and of feasting, and of sending portions one to
another and gifts to the poor, as becomes a
people who live in the light of nearly nineteen
Christian centuries.