Evening Post. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1918. MESSAGE OF CHRISTMAS

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 152, 24 December 1918, Page 6

Evening Post. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1918. MESSAGE OF CHRISTMAS

For the first time in five years Christmas does not come upon us in circumstances that seem to make a mockery and a reproach of the religious and social observances with which tho day is associated in Christian thought and practice. For all the Christian world the season is one of peace and good-will which makes its influence felt even among those who have wandered far from the simple faith of eighteen or nineteen centuries ago. We are indeed told that even the association of a message pf peace and goodwill with the first Christmas morning is erroneous, and that the real message was one of peace to men oj good-will. But snch verbal niceties,' , even if well founded, really do not help the matter much. The first Christmas, message may not really have been one of universal peace and good-will, and Milton's history may have been as faulty as' his verse was noble when he adopted the tradition that the event which the message commemorated gave -to the unknowing heathen world, a sudden respito from

No war or battle's sound Was heard the world around, The idle spear and shield were high uphung, ' , The hooked chariot stood ■Unstained by hostile blood, The trumpet spako not tp the armed throng-, And kings sat still with awful eye, As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by. Domett js doubtless nearer the mark than Milton when he describes the proud indifference of " the senator of haughty Rome " to everything but his own power and pleasure as his chariqt roils him home from lordly revel on. that same ■ first Christmas morning : .

Triumphal arches gloaming' swell His breast with thoughts of broadest \s\vay; What recked the Roman what befell

A paltry province far away, In the solemn midnight Centuries ago!

A universal peace may not have been effected or even proclaimed on that fateful morning, and the pagan world may have proceeded just, as before with its bloodshed, and its revelry. But after conceding all that may be said against the execution, or even the promise, of a sudden breach with the past on the day in question, what greater travesty, not merely of the letter of this text or that but of the whole spirit and substance of Christianity, can well be imagined than the terrible orgy of blood in which mil,lions of Christians have been engaged and millions have been destroyed? For four Christmases in succession, and for more than four years, the carnage has proceeded, and the longer it lasted the more terrible it . became. The pagan world saw nothing like it. Attila and Timour were mere 'prentice hands in slaughter in comparison with the Christians of the twentieth century. Those famous butchers had the will to be devilish, and they did their best according to their lights. But lacking the diabolical aid of modern weapons and methods of destruction, the Attila of'the fifth century hns been hopelessly, outclassed by the Attila of to-day.

If we sat day and night "(wrote tho Daily News in August last) and saw the ghostly procession of those slain in the war file by in ranks of four, minute by minute, ten years would pass, and still tho tale of tho world's sacrifice of its youth and strength and hope would not have been told. And* if-behind tlic dead there filed the host .of the maimed, the halt, the dumb, the paralysed, fifty years would hardly exhaust the dreadful spectacle.

Neither the malignity of Swift nor the irony of Gibbon ever devised a more scathing satire upod our Christianity than that which Christians have thus been compiling during the last four years and a-half. Yet the horrors so graphically summarised by the Daily News necessarily increase our thankfulness that the fifth Christmas of this' most terrible of wars will be without, bloodshed, and that it sees the cause of righteousness triumphant with a decisiveness which six months ago was beyond expectation and nine months ago was almost beyond hope. And in this, decisive triumph of the right we can see tho proof that the blood which has been poured out like water has not been; shed in vain, and the hope that from all these sacrifices and sufferings the world will date a now birth of freedom, justice, and security really worthy of the appalling price. Even now we may perhaps see that the price has not been too great if we attempt to realise what a German vie-, tory would have meant'for mankind. It would have meant the triumph of wickedness of every kind, of cruelty, brutality, and treachery, of crime not casually or impulsively committed, but carefully and coldly calculated, aeientifically organM, ttud. sauced, uad deUfa«»td|y.

adopted as an instrument of government; the destruction of every vestige of freedom in the world and the subjection of everything to this great, greedy, heartless, ruthless, criminal Power; the proof that nineteen centuries of Christianity had culminated in the helpless subjection of the whole world.to the nation that in its insane lust, of power had elevated wickedness into a policy, and said, "Evil, be thou my good."

If, then, a victory for Germany would have meant a victory, for the devil, wo are surely bound to say not merely that the sacrifices of the men who preferred death to dishonour were not in vain, but that they have won the most glorious triumph in the history of the world. They have saved liberty, justice, and religion from the deadliest of perils, and opened up for every good cause possibilities that were undreamed of before the war. It has certainly not been in the spirit of the old Crusaders, or as the conscious propagators of religion, that most of those who have died that the rest of us might live in peace and comfort went, cheerfully to their fate. But many of them builded better than they knew, and this was indeed inevitable if, as Mt. March Phillips Has finely said, "Christianity and liberty are spiritual and political aspects of the same thing." These two aspect? of the modern Crusader's mission are admirably harmonised by a Christian minister in a land where nearly fifty years of German tyranny has fired the spirit of liberty to the intensity of a

religious passion,

Bondage (said Pastor Charles Wagner, of Alsace, in one of his last utterances) is the supremo shame and the supreme misery for a man conscious of his nobility and divine origin. . All religious and moral motives unite to make us the defenders of tho right. There is neither excuse nor escape; the man of violence must bo overthrown if we would agaih lead a quiet and free life. (The nations) all understand that the world would be ruled by men without conscience, if conscientious men are not ready to support the ri^ht by armed force. Let this hour find us ready and strong, determined to follow the Chief Who is .marching ahead, and Who did hot die oti Calvary to doom His disciples to bondago, but to bring them forth to liberty.

The hour came, and with it came the men. They died in their millions in order that we should have liberty instead of bondage. They have made the world safe, not merely for democracy, but fw every form of government that is* content to respect the rights of its neighbours. They have also made it safe for Christianity^ and justified the hope that' thfe: strong nations will no longer prey upon the weak, and that even international relations may be governed by Christian principles. Christianity has after all less reason to be ashamed of the greatest of wars than to cherish an everlasting -gratitude^ to the , men who achieved her great deliverance, and to tho Providence that crowned their efforts, for the triumph by which it has been crowned, /for the opportunities which it has opened up, and for the valour of, the immortal dead to whom, under the guiding hand of Providence,' these glorious results are due.