CHRISTMAS, It's Meaning and Significance.

Taranaki Daily News, 17 December 1926, Page 2 (Supplement)

CHRISTMAS, It's Meaning and Significance.

St the Rev.

A. H. Collins.

Love eamie down at Christmas, Lore all lovely, Love Divine, Love was horn at Christmas, Star and angeTs gave the sign

Thus sings C. G. Rossetti, and it carries us to the essential meaning of the Advent Season. Once more, to the music of happy bells, devout men of all lands and creeds forget the things which divide in tlie deep, full joy of the love that makes them one. Drawn by tlie great and gracious mystery of the Inearnation, the Holy Catholic Chureh, assumes her singing rolies, and echoes back the angels’ song in carol and roundilay. It is striking to note that the opening act in each of the two great dramas of creation and redemption was set to music. The corner stone of the old eartli was laid at daydawn, and in the matin song which woke darkness “the merning stars sang together and all the sons of God sliented for joy.” In tlie same way, it was while tlie dawn was marching witli swift and soundless steps across the Judean Hills ■ that the first Christmas carol rang, clarion clear beneath the Syrian stars: Glory to God in the highest, And peace to men of goodwill. Thus fittingly, Christianity came in to the music of heavenly voices, for its evangel lias changed the face of Life and Death. It has put a song on lips long drawn with pain, and tremulous with grief, and kindled in our mid-most darkness the quenchless flame of a new and immortal Hope. Father Christmas is welcome for the sake of the atmosphere he brings, an atmosphere of good cheer and big-heart-ed care for tlie needy and tlie suffering. Even the mean hearted Scrooge coif ’ not escape the infection of goodwi i mid benevolence. To our British ar tors, through many generations, Christmas has been a special season of family reunion and feasting, and minstrelrys a time of sober yet cheerful thought. Even the superstitions of the people were hallowed by a child-like faith, as witness the words of Shakespeare : Some say, that ever 'gainst that season conies Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad; The nights are wholesome, then no planet strikes, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So gracious and so hallowed is the time. The quaint customs and the curious ! beliefs of three centuries ago provoke a disdainful smile, but it may be questioned if witfli our multiplied sources of amusement the capacity for genuine | mirth lias kept pace with the stress of modern life, and there is still good reason for us to halt in the mad race for wealth and pleasure and practice the art of being kind. 'Midst the influence of the Christmas season,, the sentiment of the fine old feasting song of George Wither is revived: — Without the door let sorrow lie,

And if for cold, it hap to die, We'll bury it in a Christmas pie, And evermore be merry. For as the Incarnation represents Heaven's best gift to a needy world, the Christmastide festivities require the free exercise of gracious bounty, the reconciling of social and personal differences, and the cultivation of peace and goodwill in all the relations of huuian life. Very arresting, too, is the light the Advent Season flings on the mystery ami the beauty of child life. As an English writer has remarked, “The perfect State, the perfect Church, the perfect brotherhood, are not yet. Tlieir gestation is long because their quality is so high.” But at the first Christmas Humanity enlarged its boundaries to take in Divinity in tlie lowly guise of the Babe of Bethlehem. “Birth is the greatest thing in the world,” says John Brierley. “Here is a force for change, for movement, against which no human thought, structure, however venerable, however authoritative, can hold out. . . . There comes into this sphere a fresh mind and soul, a fresh generation of souls, that finds ill itself a sense, a preception of things that nothing of the old system answers to. These souls have, in fact, brought with them a new atmosphere, through which they rend history and the universe in a new way.” The birth at Bethlehem signalised for mankind a spiritual advance so great as to involve a revolution which upset and demolished most of the old-world religious “infallibilities.” Very significant, also, is lhe fact that Jesus was born in a stable—a real stable, dark, dirty and ill-smelling; and from the' beginning He was familiar with the embarrassments of the poor. He lived in a lime-washed cottage with little comfort and no luxury. _He made I ploughs and yokes for the cattle, and the farmer wlio wanted honest work and I a fair price came to the Carpenter of Nazareth. But then, as now, people looked down on working men. His Naz- j areth neighbours sneered, “is not this the carpenter’s son ?” That waft the common estimate of tlie labourer. Cicero said: “The mechanic’s occupation is degrading. A workshop is incompatible with anything noble.’- We have moved far ahead of this, for Jesus the Artisan has dignified honest toil, and the carpenter at his bench may feel comradeship with his Lord. “I don’t know right where His shed may have stood, But often as I've been a planing wood, I’ve took off my hat when thinking of He At the same work as rue,

And I’ll warrant He felt a bit pride like I’ve done At a good job begun. So I comes right away by myself with the book, And I turns the old pages and has a good look. At the text 1 have found, that tells as He Were the same trade as me. But if the music of tire Holy Nativity be interpreted as prophetic of the heavenly harmony which shall yet be evolved out of the discords of earth, it muse be confessed the prophesy still waits fulfilment, and it must lie worked for by men of gcod will, ailtl only as it is worked for will the ideal become tlie actual. Nevertheless, in spite of much in our twentieth Century civilisation that perplexes thii mind and Saddenft the -heart, it must not be forgotten that it is to Jesus Christ we owe Our very eofiseiousnesS of diseortl, our sense of dissatisfaction with things as they are, and our ifiefentiVfe th make them what

they should be. Had it not been for i the httlc leaven cast by His Hund into the heart of humanity there would have Ixten no such ferment of social unrest as we witness to-day. Were it not for the gleaming ideals which He set before the vision of the race, we should to-day hn\e been sitting down, if not yet tolerant of wrong. Bui since Jesus came and revealed the common Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man there lias been a deep and Divine discontent in the breast of humanity, winch will never be allayed till these filial and fraternal relations are everywhere recognised and fulfilled. It is an essential principle of the new social order which is emerging that there shall be no perfect rest -or peace for any till there is rest and peace for ail. ’ Tlie patriots, of the new kingdom impose upon themselves this self-denying ordin- : mice—-not to sit down to the enjoyment | of all their chartered rights till every i child of man lias been invested'with tlie I freedom of the City of God. When the followers of tty Nazarene refuse, like their Divine Master, to drink tlie-wine of social satisfaction till they can drink it new in tlie Father’s Kingdom, and together with all their emancipated and affiliated brethren, the world will begin to believe in the Christianity they profess. The Apostle John, with ” great plainness of speech, flatly calls the man | a liar who professes love to God and yet defaults in loving service to his brother man, and it is this kind of lying that lias done more to alienate men from the Chureh of Christ than all the written or spoken lies of all. her adversaries in every age. ‘Look at.our civilisation,”, says one, “in which the gifts of invention and industry are supposed to make us to inherit the eartli. Is there any reality behind it?” A well-known Hindoo put this question after a stay of five years in Europe. “What is this civilisation, anyhow? I have lived in four of its chief centres and have studied it with the little light .1 have, and I confess that the study lias deeply pained me. This vaunted civilisation has raised selfishness to a religious creed, mammon to the throne of God, and falsehood to a fine art. It has created artificial wants for man, and made him the slave of work to satisfy them; it has made him restless without and within, and robbed him of leisure, the only friend of high thought. He knows no place, hence he knows not himself nor the real object of life. It has made him a breathing! lighting, hustling, spinning machine.” Thcso are barbed words, well worth serious thought, and the problem they raise sends us back to the gospel of the Incarnation.

When, instead of construing Christ through historic Christianity or the imI perfections of Christian professors, men consent to come with nn open mind to the study of His matchless Personality, they will find themselves conquered by the victorious Galilean, and will cast their crowns at His feet. All the great social impulses that are making for the improved condition of the masses are the outcome, directly or indirectly, of Christ’s life and work. The fierce industrial strifes that periodically rage throughout the world, tlie battles between labour and capital that disturb the markets of the old world and the new, are simply the outworking of the principle of universal brotherhood which Christ lived to teach and died to prove. It is an unrest which His teachings have created and which their whole-hearted acceptance alone can allay. Applied Christianity is the only solvent of our social problems, for it strikes at selfishness which is the root of all. The Incarnation is the most stupendous act of self-sacrifice that the world has ever seen. That the Divine should thus veil Hi itself in human form, that the Eternal should place Himself under the limitations of time, plunges us into the heart of a mystery which overpowers the thought, paralyses the imagination, and smites the ages with speechless awe. But the fact remains that the acceptance of this insohflilo mystery has been creative of tlie most potent moral forces of our world, and these are the forces which are everywhere making for the freedom- and the blessedness, of universal man. For, again, to quote Rossetti:Love shall be our token, Love be yours and mine, Love for God and all men, Love for plea, and gift ami sign.