THE CHRISTMAS FESTIVAL.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 December 1931, Page 12

THE CHRISTMAS FESTIVAL.

Igj r ,. —Be tlhe Christmas festival, it should bring its message to all to forget and forgive. I think the massed Catholic and Protestant choirs’ at the midnight Mass on Christmas Eve paramount to all others in its kindly sentiments. Everyone knows that all aie fathered there to celebrate the birth of the Carpenter Jesus, Who .suffered down in Judea. The Catholic wears a . cross in memory of the cross upon which He was crucified. Among the Protestants some will wear small emblems of the Carpenter’s tools in memory. _ To put it shortly, they are all akin in trying to maintain and further His teachings and so make the world kindly, cherish the babe, and the mother because of her child. Each year the scientists and inventors give us something more to be thankful for. The people in their revered ignorance thought the lightning was made but to strike and blast, but the scientist in his unaided vigil saw it could be harnessed, hence the wireless call from the sinking .ship and a. thousand other uses to aid man in his struggle for an existence. Revered ignorance suffered women to be sold as slaves in the open market. The scientists Darwin, Haeckel and others, with the geological testimony of the rocks, revealed the evolution of the human mother with her great gift to man, which she carried and cherished in her heart down through the ages from when she crooned it to her ba.be in those ancient forests from which our coal beds were formed. Such was her patience and care that, like the zephyr, so light was her step that no leaf was stirred, no wave was driven, while during a million years she wove with zephyr worsted her invisible shawl of parental love with which she has environed her children. Then, when they as creatures of their environment loved each other with that love which is not passion, then, and then only, could pity, poetry or honour live among men. All the music of the world evolved from the crooning and singing of the mother to her babe. Furthermore, had not the mother inculcated brotherly love within the heart of man the words of the Carpenter Jesus would have had no meaning or response. Christianity can be truly named the rock of ages cleft to shelter the helpless woman and her babe, for before its advent there were no proper marriage laws. The social fabric was a festering mass of rottenness and women were treated as brutes and sold as slaves. The great Roman Republic during its whole career illustrates the observation that the system on which it was founded included no conception of the actual relations of man. It dealt with him as a thing, not as a being endowed with inalienable rights. Recog-, nising power as its only measure of value, it could never accept the principle of the equality of all men in the eyes of the law. It was the Carpenter whose birthday we are about to celebrate who inscribed the equality of man in the eyes of His law upon the rock of ages which he cleft for man. The churches are the foundation of that rock; why not rejoice and cheer them?—l am, etc., C. WESLEY. Opupake, December 18, lfi3l.