The broad ax. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1895-19??, 1918-12-21

Once more all the people residing
in all parts of the so-called civilized
or the Christian world are in the
midst of the holiday season for this
coming Wednesday, December 25, is
Christmas, and with joyful hearts and
good feeling they will cele-
brate Christmastide in honor of the
birth of Jesus of Nazareth, who was
born in the land of Judea more than
nineteen centuries ago.
From his great contemporaries.
Philo and Josephus, we learn that Jo-
seph, his father, and Mary, his moth
er, who was also the mother of three
or four other children aside from the
Son of God, according to the Holy
Bible, that they were extremely
poor, and were unable to give Him
any educational advantages; that all
but eighteen months of His life was
devoted to working at His trade
that of a carpenter"
Consequently Jesus grew up to
manhood totally unacquainted with
any of the rudiments pertaining to an
education, that he was simply human
and was subject to all the diseases
which have and which will continue
to affect all the sons and daughters
of humanity, that He came into this
breathing and living world in the
natural course of events and left it
in the same manner; it is true that
when he began to preach the people
were attracted to him by the won
derful amount of magnetism which
he possessed and the bold stand he
assumed against the priesthood, for
be it remembered that Jesus was the
greatest socialist or anarchist or in
fidel of his day and generation.
1t is also true that Jesus was I'M
like Moses, Buddha, Zeno, Mahomet,
Confucius or Socrates, for all of
those great moral teachers or philos-
ophers were the founders of new re-
ligious systems or doctrines, but Jesus
did not give expression to one single
new thought or truth during the eigh-
teen months of his ministry.
Even the golden rule which his
followers claim he was the author of
was promulgated by Confucius, the
great Chinese lawgiver or philosopher,
more than five hundred years before
the Christian era; it was the mission
of the meek and lowly Jesus to re-
clothe and re-voice those touching and
enobling sentiments which had be-
come dim in the hearts of the multi
tude at the time he walked and talked
to those who had gathered around
him.
What Jesus desired principally to
do was to reform the Jewish priest
hood, and for endeavoring to perform
that act the Jewish people finally sue
ceeded in persuading the Roman au-
thorities to arrest Jesus for violating |
the Roman laws. He was tried,
found guilty, according to the Roman
and Jewish laws and customs, and
forty days after his death upon the
cross the Church of Christ was estab-
ished in the holy city of Jerusalem,
and the elders of that church were
Ill circumsized Jews. That new sect
lid not progress very rapidly, and at
he end of two hundred years it had
almost become extinct. Its adherents
we're at first meek and humble; they
we're very careful to refrain from i'm
PRESSING their religious ideas upon
he gentiles and the pagans, but as
ime went by Constantine, the Great
Emperor of Rome, who ruthlessly
murdered his wife and children, be-
anne a convert to the teachings of
he religion of the cross; then its ad-
Ierents became bold, dogmatic and