THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1928. THE SEASON OF GOODWILL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 20137, 24 December 1928, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1928. THE SEASON OF GOODWILL.

Only the most reckless of men could advocate the abolition of Christmas. There have been such: they have gone their way without honour. There are sonic still —in Russia, where all popular institutions have been of late in deadly peril. No doubt the coining years will produce a few, for sanity is not assured to (he whole human race. But Christmas has become so much a part and parcel of civilisation that it would take more than ordinary courage—the courage linked with mad misanthropy to wing a shaft at it. In books, of course, the thing is done. Ebenezer Scrooge bears witness. Your novelist, however, employs care not to identify himself too closely with the anathemas heaped upon Christmas by his overbold character, and usually takes advantage of easy opportunity either to convert the colossal sinner or prove him damned beyond redemption. Quite a large number of people, doubtless, can find fault with this or that way of spending Christmas, and can wax vehemently angry about their pet aversion in the seasonal observance. Yet they studiously avoid attacking Christmas itself, and are eager to aver that their crusade against this or that misuse of the occasion is undertaken in the interests of the festival itself. The unmusical—and the musical —will threaten to shoot the waits : queer ancient relatives see nothing but perfidious injury to childhood in the lavish bestowal of presents : habits of over-eating—to say nothing of over-drinking—are put down to the debit of Christmas by sundry querulous keepers of other people's accounts. So the scattered objections go. But they leave the season unhit in any vital part. It remains and will remain secure in general regard, not because it is faultless in its varied observances — it is not faultless —but because at heart it accords with deeply abiding human instincts. Even those features of it that sometimes evoke reproof from the captious critic arc but the excesses of its virtues. They betoken a real, even though it lie sometimes a rollicking, w.sh that everybody shall he happy, and that is a philosophy and gospel it is quite impossible to gainsay. It is as the season of goodwill that Christmas makes its effective universal appeal, A spirit of fellowship is then abroad. It "sets the solitary in families." The sacred tic of home gets at this season a renewal of attraction. The scattered family returns to the old roof-tree with an invincible instinct. If some of its members cannot foregather there again bv reason of distance, they at least send a message of affeciion. So long as the roof-tree stands, this homing instinct is felt, and fond memories, grown a little rusty through neglect, get furbished anew. And in the bursting then of the floodgates behind which family affection has been imprisoned in the interval of separation is an earnest of the creating of a fraternity wider than the. home. It is the habit of love to dig channels rather than to construct, cisterns, and in this beneficent employ it goes abroad at Christmas beyond the family frontiers in a wonderful prodigality of kindliness. Walls of reserve between mere acquaintances get broken down. Even strangers are naturally greeted as if they had full right to be in the inmost circle. Friendship is allowed larger room to grow. The poor and rieedv arc given thought in love's largesse. Ciffs, not gains, are the order of the day. Estrangements get suddenly, graciously healed. Class is forgotten. Racial walls of partition become promisingly thin. There is an instinctive acknowledgment of universal human kinship. Whatever all the rest of the year has done to place men asunder and at odds, Christmas undoes it all in a trice. Not permanently, That were too much to ex-

pect. Agelong competition is not easily overborne, and its habits are apt to spring again to influence. Still, it is much to have them broken, even for a momentary truce. Yet tho comprehension of this miracle of goodwill halts short of achievement unless it makes much of the gracious idyll at the heart of it all. It may be that, had the world not been given such a recurring season of goodwill, it would have had to make one for itself. Men cannot be always at daggers drawn. The instinct of fellowship is at least as deep as the innate antagonisms that separate and estrange. So a truce must come, at times, to break the monotony of struggle. Such speculation, however, is to no purpose. Mankind has been given a Christmas. Whatever the elements, more or less alien, incorporated from nioro ancient days in the modern world's observance of the festival, its centre is the story of the Babe of Bethlehem. That story transcends all else, and in it is the germ-thought of the universal goodwill inspired by the season. A human brotherhood owning no common sonship would lio not only difficult to imagine with any regard for logic: it would be incapable of application to life with any force or security. It would break down, for lack of imperative, at the first challenge made by selfishness. But in the Bethlehem stoiv is that needed imperative. It declares that human life is a divine creation, that this is not an orphan world, that over it a striving love rules and can break in to bless it. About the mangercradle all men may crowd and worship. It belongs to all of them. And as tliey meet there they learn to understand each other better, and become inspired to co-operate id ministry to tho bringing of a brighter world. Insular life becomes unthinkable. Instead comes a longing well expressed in the toast with which Dickens, the best exponent of the spirit of Christmas, invariably initiated dinner on that day in his own home—' Ilcre sto us all: God bless us!"