The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1905-12-23
THE HnARr OF oHR1srMAs.

The touching simplicity Of the Christmas
story has made it the Joy of childhood since
the first Christian children were told about the
mother, the manger, and the child; while its
fathomless spiritual beauty has appealed to
the most devout and creative among the sons
of genius and has left its record in the art of
the world in host of exquisite masterpieces.
The little drama, so humbly staged, in condi-
tions so obscure and commonplace, was not
without witness of its sublime significance.
Enacted in threaten SO mean, by actors of
such lowly station, the divine mystery which
shone through it and made it the most tran
scendent event in the history of the race was
not wholly hidden. In it the Divine and the
Human were SO marvelously combined, truth
and form so subtly and deeply harmonized,
that if it was the creation of the imagination
nothing else that man has done approaches it
in depth ane audacity Of insight and sublimity
of setting.
Nothing could have been meaner in condition
than the maDger in which the Christ was era
died, nothing more glorious than the lighting
of the star which shone above it there was
no state humber than that of the shepherd
there has never been such thrilling music since
time began as the Hymn of Love which they
heard chanted by the heavenly choir; the babe
in his mothers arms was the symbol of help
lessness, but the wise men who came from
afar knelt at his shrine. This meeting and
commiDgliLg of the Divine at its highest and
the Human at its lowiest is without parallel
in the history of man for audacity of insight
and faith, for splendor of vision and revelation.
The meaning of this touchiDgly simple and
marvelously profound drama has never yet
vision of the race has been purified by the
cleanliness of its heart and the faith Of the race
deepened and lifted by its accomplished right
eonsness. The secrets OF God are hidden, not
because they are inaccessible. but because the
means of approaching them are not secured;
life remains a mystery, not because it is
shrouded in darkness, but because the higher
insight is lacking. All good men believe in
goodness, and the better men are, the more
sensitive and keen becomes their perception of
goodness. To man without sin God would
appear not only probable but inevitable; to
the pure in heart the sovereignty of righteous
ness at the heart of the universe is inevitable.
The world has failed to find God because the
world has never yet been pure enought to see
Him that is the real truth about the matter
Those who have striveD, like Paracelsus, to
find their way by the path of knowlege have,
like Paracelsus, found the way hard, lonely,
battling, and barred at the end by the bitter
ness of disillusion and defeat Those who
have striven for perfection by Withdrawing
from their fellows and striving in isolation to
attain the peace and growth which can be
secured only in that service and fellowship,
which is reverence for the souls God has made,
have learned much but have missed the final
vision. The gate to the full disclosure of the
Divine Person, in whom all the forces and
powers and possibilities of life are perfectly
realized, is so narrow that few have passed
through it. 1t stands open forever, but so ex-
acting is the preparation which puts off pride
of intellect and self-consciousness 10 right
doing, and demands stainless purity of nature
and childlike humility of trust, that few, even
among the best, have clearly seen the glory
which lies beyond.
1t is the sin in the world which makes God
invisible, and it is lack of nobleness in our
spirits which makes the real truth of Christ
mas SO difficult to discern and accept. Our
brethren of the Roman faith have given ex-
preston to deep instinct in their alteration of
the Holy Mother; and in the worship of the
world there is nothing more touching than the
love of children for the Madonna, and the
sweet trustfulness of their approach to her
shrines and the simplicity of their prayers.
She seems to take them by the hand and lead
them up the great altar steps of the world to
Him whose awful purity and stainless love
make Him remote and almost inaccessible to
a multitude of striving and sinful men and
women. The Catholic insiinctively recognizes
what the Protestant too often fails to compre-
bend; the divinity of motherhood; but TO
neither has come the complete vision. No
where in any faith, have men so fully OWNED
the heart of the Christmas story that they have
gone away and lived in its light forevermore.
The sacredness of human life in its meanest
forms; the nexhaustibe beauty of that which
in our blindness we call the commonplace ;
above all, the divinity which clothes mother
hood and childhood-these are the traDscen
dent truths which lie in the heart of the Christ
mss story. If every woman were sacred to
every man, the mystery of motherhood were
encompassed by reverence, would God be any
longer incredible, or the value and dignity of
life remain an open question? Far deeper
than any thought which lay in Goethe's mind
when he wrote, 1.-The eternal feminine leads
us on,'' is the sublime light which shone for
moment on the woman who held the child
Jesus in her arms and, in sudden revelation
from heaven, made the meaning of mother
hood forever clear. So universal is the expert
ence, so often is it allied with all that is most
vile in human thought and act, so common
is its proclamation, so grossly has it been mis-
interpreted by good and priestly men, that the
world has almost lost its sense of wonder and
awe in those thrilling moments when, at the
gates of death, life reappears and renews itself
in endless generations.
When all the actual conditions of life are
seen in the light of that moment as it was illu-
minated by the birth in Bethlehem, it is easy
to understand why men are still asking wheth-
er there be God. whether the world be not
mockery or a brief iridescence on the waters
of inconsistencies and oblivion. Not until
motherhood becomes divine to us shall we
reverence one another; not until we reverence
one another shall we wholly believe in God.
Christmas brings to us, not speculation
about our possible relationship to God in some
final commingling ofthe divine and the human
in unconscious being; it is historic revela-
ton, in actual happenings, in the lives of real
persons of kinship between the indestructi-
BILE soul of God and the indestructible soul of
man, so sublime in the possibilities which it
reveals of human perfection and bliss that we
are still doubling whether it can be true, or
painfully hoping that it may be true. There
shines the immortal truth, and the path to it
is not through knowledge but through obedi-
dience, purity, service, forgetfulness of self,
reverence for all for whom the Christ was born
in Bethlehem.
AT THE end of forty years Col. John r. Hurd,
of Colorado. has just learned that he was
brevetted brigadier general by President Lin
coin. The honor is discovered late, but time