A Festival of Light

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 80, 28 December 1935, Page 18

A Festival of Light

“Christmas is a season which links the present with the past. Many of its usages are traditional, and perhaps some of its ‘good old customs’ might seem less good if they were not old. But a wise instinct rightly prizes this sense of continuity.

“The lapse of centuries has not weakened its first significance. Christmas is still the festival of light, and to keep it well is to be grateful for the illumination which shines from Bethlehem upon the problems of existence. Perhaps already there is a growing sense that to see life and human nature as Christ saw them is to view them not through a golden mist of idealism, but in the clear light of reality. “To transmute Christ’s counsel into practice proves to be, after all, the soundest working policy. Oddly enough, too, some of our sociologists are proclaiming to-day as discoveries of modern thought what are in fact essential principles of the New Testament. The need of striking a right balance between individual and corporate responsibilities, the sane wisdom on occasion of audacious venture as a means of progress, the folly of hate, the futility of arrogance, the fact which the Christmas angels proclaimed that peace must be the product of goodwill —these are not merely truths but, in a literal sense, Gospel truths, and it is not the twentieth century, but the first which gave them to the world. “Among communities, as among individuals, the habit yet persists of confining religion to the background of thought. But Christmas encourages' hopes of a future when nations which share the Christian faith will find in

it the best basis of co-operation, proving the old covenants to be less truthworthy than the New Testament as a sourc® of unity.—“ The Times” (London).