THE CHRISTMAS FAITH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18897, 20 December 1924, Page 21 (Supplement)

THE CHRISTMAS FAITH.

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD.

BT KOTARE.

"IVas in the calm and silent night! ■The Senator of haughty Rome Impatient urged his chariot's flight. From lordly revel rolling home! Triumphal arches gleaming swell His breast with thoughts of boundless away; ' What rocked the Roman, what befell A paltry pxovinoe "far away, In solemn midnight Centuries ago!

So Alfred Domett, Premier of New Zealand,; saw the first Christmas morning far through the mist of the years. Pride preened itself in the high places, and life, ran hectically through the streets of Imperial itorue. And out on the Empire's confines, in a humble Syrian town, a simple village girl brought forth her firstborn son and laid him in a manger. The haughty noble has mingled with the dust these 1900 years; with him perished all that had made him great. His very name is buried deep in the ruins of an Empire's overthrow. That little child still rules in the hearts of men; .men of every colour and sky own Hi as Lord; a million million soldiers have marched under His banner. He has commanded the 'willing devotion of the noblest spirits of all generations; He has inspired a sublimity of self-sacrifice'and a zeal for service beforo which all other enthusiasms the world has known fade into nothingness. From Him has come practically every impulse that lias worked in the hearts of men for the service of mankind. Life would have been an immeasurably poorer thing for everyone of us had He not come so humbly to the little town of Bethlehem on the first Christmas morning. The facts are there for all to read, indisputably written in the history of. the race. It-is when men seek to explain the tacts that the trouble comes, the trouble that has filled the ages with the din and dust of religious controversy. Controversy never brings us much farther forward. We can surely let, the dust settle at Christmas, time, and be content to sit at the Master's feet to learn of Him. He focussed in Himself in one supreme radiance of light, ideas that had touched to nobler issues this and that noble seeker after truth since first man began to ponder the meaning and the value of human life. Fatherhood, ; Foremost in His teaching was His conception of God. It has been found that a religion's power to mould the lives and characters of men depends primarily on its'idea of God. A spring cannot rise higher than its source. He found a world nurtured in the faith that God was either a kind of Oriental super-tyrant, full of whims and caprices and having the power to insist that they should be obeyed or so far enthroned in the dim majesty of the heavens that the concerns of mankind could scarcely ever rise to, His consciousness. With such a being, a vital contact on the part of insignificant man was scarcely possible; or it was possible on- terms that ministered little to man's self-respect. ."..'.''.,

So He called on man to rethink God. He insisted oh that first of all. He brought the unknown, the vaguely realised, into definite touch with the needs and aspirations of the ordinary man. He claimed that the Being whose power men had acknowledged, whose holiness they were beginning in a.'measure to understand from the moral constitution of the universe and the lesson of history, whose wisdom they realised the.more fully the deeper they penetrated into the mystery of life/ that this Being was no aloof tyrant, no , harsh master of slaves, but tnat before all things He was Love. The power that had planned the world, that nad dominated its history, that was working ceaselessly to the ends clearly visualised from the beginning was no blind impulse, but was before and above everything else: Love. He . embodied that conception ■in the master-phrase: Our Father. Peace. At a stroke man's horror of loneliness was gone. When this faith came, the weak was strong, the coward faced the torture-chamber and the stake. The pain and anguish of life, the shadow of death, fell into their appointed place in a scheme of things motived and controlled by Love. The heavens were no longer of brass against which the sorrows and prayers of a doomed race beat in vain. Nearer was He thi.n breathing, closer than hands and feet Religion became a personal contact with a Being infinitely gracious, infinitely merciful. Life found at once a purpose and a source of inspiration. There came the peace of the soul in tune with the Infinite, in definite personal relations with One whom it could call Father. The greatest of His followers could find no words to express that sense of unity with the Power behind and in the universe. "The peace that passeth understanding"— was as near as a nan's vocabulary could get to it. Peace that could comfort the penitent weeping for his sins, that could flood a heart broken with life's sorrows and partings, that could keep a man stedfast and immovable while the fires consumed his body, that could still all tremors in 'the Vdley of the Shadow of Death—Peace, says Paul, that passcth understanding. That is and must be the essence of the Christmas message. It meets man's deepest needs in the deepest levels of experience. There is nowhere he can stand and be beyond its reach. It makes the whole world a unity and he . takes his place naturally and inevitably in a perfect whole. It gives him a universal principle of action and an unfailing source of comfort and of strength. Not in the subtlety of its metaphysics, not in its appeal to the mind of man alone, but above all, in its adequacy to every need of the heart and life in the whole range of human experience did Christ's invitation to rethink God in El is terms, conic as the message of hope to a hopeless world. Se;vice. All else flows from that. The meaning of life then came to be the establishment cf a child-like relation of love and trust with the Father. That implies that the. child will love the things the Father loves, do the things He wants done; in a word, must make the supreme end of hie life to do the Father's will. So the great Christmas ideal must always be service. A man's worth is determined by his willingness to serve his day and generation. The one unpardonable sin is selfishness, whatever form it. takes. Religious selfishness is the worst of the lot. You find the realisation of that in tie universal desire to do something for others at Christinas time. The orphan and the sick must have something to mark the season; the children must find it th. happiest time of the year. A vague instinct, perhaps, but it shows that as usual the heart of man is .sound, and will usually lead him right, ' So Christmas comes again to a world still sadly stricken. It has become increasingly hard these Inst ten years to rethink God in Christ's terms. But the same faith in God and man has carried the world through darker times in the past; and here once again, doubtless, rather than in political nostrums and panaceas, will be found the inspiration and tb* power to lift the world into the Age of Peaco.