Alexandria gazette. [volume] (Alexandria, D.C.) 1834-1974, 1902-12-23
TUESDAY Evening. DEC. %, 1902
HAPPY CHRISTMAS SEASON.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS SEASON.
We are drawing near the end of an
other year. Since the last Christmas
greeting the planet on which we live
and move and have our being has made
its annual sidereal journey. In accom-
plishing this it has traversed six hun
dred millions of miles at the inconceiv-
able velocity of about sixteen miles
second. This has brought the earth in
perihelion, or its nearest approach to Its
great luminary-the sun-which is CO.
incident with ushering in season when
most civilized people are called upon to
contemplate "The Sun of Righteous
ness, which arose with healing In His
wings" over nineteen hundred years
ago.
There is a time for all things-and
this is a period when we feel con-
strained to cast off the worries and frets
of life, the perplexities and tolls Of our
everyday plodding, the controversies
incident to past and modern issues, ana
local. State, national or international
politics, and imbibe of the spirit which
makes us all akin.
There is no time so appropriate as the
Christmas season, and no lessons more
sacred to ponder over than those sug-
gested at this time. While there is JOY
in the air-and there should be-this is
but natural accompaniment of far
more satisfying feast of the soul, when
the true import of Christmas is compre-
hended-that is as far as we mortals are
allowed to drink it in.
The occasion is the celebration OF the
birth of the Founder of sensible and
tangible form of religion-one which has
brought life and Immortality to light and
made things plain which had perplexed
mankind for four thousand years pre-
vious to that time.
A poet thus deplores the passing away
of the age of fable:
@. We delicious fables, where The wave
And woods were peopled, and the air, with
things
So lovely! why, all. why has science grave
Scattered afar your sweet imaginings?
But there is no cunningly-devised
fable connected with Christmas, nor has
"science grave" nineteen centuries after
the scenes at Bethlehem disproved one
lot or title of what so many have
conscientiously believed from the time
the Magi were guided by the star to the
babe in the manger.
Jupiter, Prometheus, Apollo and the
thirty thousand other deities of the days
of ancient Greece have long since be-
come mute blocks of stone in deserted
cities and museums, while the Sermon on
the Mount has echoed down the ages and
and the congregation has expanded in
to listeners of every nation, tongue and
people.
When Paul stood in Athens at be
dawn of the Christian era the age OF
fable had about reached its zenith.
Men had been feeling after the invisible
for four thousand years. 1t was but
natural for them TO do so. They had
peopled the waves, woods and air with
fabulous beings of their own imaginings.
But the time had come when the
monuments to the skill of Phidias,
Praxiteles and others were to fall be-
fore the babe of Bethlehem. The statue
of Jupiter at Olympia and that of Min
erva in the Parthenon were not to be
exceptions. A tangible and common
sense system of theology, so plain that
the way-faring man, though a fool,
would not err therein, was to supercede
the labyrinth of imagination, fraud and
imposition.
The stories of the gods of ancient
Greece and Rome, with their contradic-
tions and improbabilities, had run their
course, and were become what the Ara
bian Nights Entertainments and the adj
ventures of Jack the Giant Killer are
to us.
May the season be pleasant TO all and
be enjoyed in all its aspects.