Year: 1875

brated as 1t 10.


Merry Christmas Was there ever a
more musical greeting, and will it ever
cease to be the most welcome of wishes
In the whole range of the English Ian
guage there is not another salutation
which can be offered with equal free
dom. A master can do no less than wish
his servant a merry Christmas, and the
servant who bids his master "good-
bye" as if fearful of presumption, will
speak up boldly when he returns his
Christmas greeting. And it is so be-
cause the simple words have come to be
expressive of the spirit of the season.
Total abnegation of self and love for
your neighbor in the broadest sense of
the word is the genius of Christmas
tide. But, strangely enough, says an
exchange, the origin of the day and the
greeting are alike unknown, for no man
can tell when the first Christmas day
was celebrated. 1t certainly could not
have been before the birth of Christ
but even that event is not definitely fix
cd, for all who are learned in such mat
ters are agreed that our era fixes the
date from three to five years too soon,
and when the year is uncertain it can
hardly be expected that the month and
the day should be certainly known.
Some say that the Savior was born on
the twentieth of May in the twenty
eighth year of Augustus reign. Others
put it on the nineteenth of April, while
the probability is that the apostles did
not knew at all what the exact date was.
And it is almost certain that they never
celebrated the day, for Christmas was
first heard of in Egypt, and the first un-
disputed traces of the celebration Of the
twenty-ffth of December as Christmas
day point no further back than the mid
die of the fourth century as the time and
to Rome as the place.. But why should
the twenty-fifth of December be the
date of the festival, when about the only
thing the earliest writer's seem to have
been agreed upon concerning it was that
it's proper location was in the spring :?
Several explanations have been attempt
ed, but none of them seem wholly salts
factory. One is that it was thought
most fit that the day of Christ's birth
should be celebrated on the birthday
of the sum-" as the winter solstice WAS
called, which occurred in the Roman
calendar on the twenty fifth of Decem-
Der. On that day the previously short
ening days began to grow longe and to
the early Christians there seems to have
been sort OF analogy, which can now
be but dimly traced, between the in
creasing sunshine and the birth of the
Son of God. Another and almost more
fanciful reason that has been soberly
given, is that Christmas was placed on
the twenty-fifth of December, in order
to give the Christians at Rome festival
peculiarly their own, and thus to dis
tract their attentio from the wild ex-
cesses of the Roman Saturnalia which
occurred at about that date. The truth
is that no adequate reason can be assign
ed for celebrating Christmas on the
twenty-ffth of December, as the festival
was wholly unknown for some centuries
after the apostolic age, and it was then
too late to fix dates by memory, and
there was very little writing, with any
degree of accuracy. But for the pur-
pose of commemorahon, any date will
do, and since the date and not the right
to celebrate this festival is called in
question, but little complaint need be
made