CUSTOMS THAT NEVER DIE

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20995, 23 December 1939, Page 13 (Supplement)

CUSTOMS THAT NEVER DIE

Significance of Christmas

THERE ARE SOME PARTS of the year, as of the earth’s surface, where the history of man can be seen as it were in section, writes “Scrutator” in the Sunday Times. Thought, like the spade of the digger, can then expose older civilisation underlying those which are modern. Such a period is Christmas. The festival spans not only the whole written history of man and his Saviour but the unwritten story of his gropings after truth and his primitive philosophy of life and nature. For Christmas is' in its origins the festival of the winter solstice, when natural life is nearest death, and its hope and joy, rising from the deepest springs in human nature, are those expressed in the poet’s question, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” It is a commonplace that we have not far to dig into the ritual of Christmastime before we reach paganism. The association of trees with the festival goes back to the days when grown men, as some children still do, endowed trees with sentient life and made them the oracles of the will and wisdom of the gods. The toys that we hang on the Christmas tree for the children recall for scholars that passage in the Georgies of Virgil, where he fells us how the peasants of his day would “hang puppet faces on tall pine to swing” in honour of the god Bacchus. Pagan and Christian There may be a mystic significance even in the pluia pudding in which there are no plums but a sprig of berry that may be a survival from Druid ritual. Certainly the mistletoe in folklore has more than the happy licence that it still gives at modem Christmas parties. For this is the Golden Bough that Aeneas plucked before he went down to the Shades and which gives to mortal eyes the power of seeing the spirits of the dead. That which grew on the oak had the most potent magic, perhaps because, parasite though it was, it made the living connection between a seeming dead sacred tree and its rebirth in the spring But, though its pagan symbolism has persisted through the ages, the manner of its observance as a Christian festival has varied. For some Puritans the Satumalian element has been so strong and distasteful as to lead to indifference to it as a Christian anniversary; not even ye + , in Scotland, has Christmas Day acquired equal importance to New Year’s Day. At some times the observance has been beautified in England by church plays and by carols, which so joyfully reconcile cheerfulness with devoutness. At different times, now this, now that aspect of the festival predominates. It was perhaps natural that the new Puritanisms and domesticity of Victorian days should make it pre-eminently a festival of the children, and close observers are saying that despite flats and smaller houses the family observance of Christmas is again becoming more marked. Some of the happy rapture that must once have been in Christmas has been lest in these days of little faith; on the other hand the new paganism ha? it. Festival of Joy But though heathen superstition jostles with faith in the ritual of the day and secularism often threatens to deprive it of both its old and new religious cc f .ext, one characteristic of Christmas is constant throughout time. Always it is a festival of joy. The unvarying wish is for a merry Christmas, one not merely tranquilly happy but ebullient in jollity, for the recurring and insistent attribute of merriment can mean nothing less. It recognises that there is a time when the gravest of us may be jolly and even play the fool without loss of dignity or worth. In human nature there is a deep-seated instinct to doff habitual caution and reserve and to behave as though one were young again and had for the moment no responsibilities. Perhaps it is a survival from days when life was more beset with terrors than it is and the moments of safety, when the guard could be dropped, were more precious. Certain it is that as there is no true religion without some ecstasy of the soul, neither is there a Christmas spirit which does not know how to relax severity and indulge the more generous view of human motives. Peace and Good Will And how “.rue it is that in such a mood one may see more of the essential truths of life about us than by the colder logical tests. It was this aspect of the Christmas spirit that Dickens expressed in such eloquently absurd paradox that he has been foolishly credited with having rediscovered Chiisrmas. Yet if happiness be the supreme end, the generous man who loves his neighbour and always gives him the credit for the best motives is wiser in that he carries its master key about with him. Whether it is better to give than to receive may be argued, but it is the literal and elementary truth, of the charity which is the spirit cf Christmas that it is the surest -way of happiness. And not of charity in the narrow sense, but in the broader sense which thinks no evil of our fellow-men, and in crediting them with good motives goes half way to a guarantee that they will act on them. Men’s irtellect is often at fault, but it is a fact that men in the mass have never been persuaded by any motive that they p re not convinced is right or that makes no appeal to their higher nature. It is a common mistake of the cynics to suppose that men are moved oy

appeals to self-interest or to the less worthy passions of envy and greed. In small matters, perhaps; but in great things never. Thus the Christian spirit of charity is not only the way of happiness but more often than not also that of practical wisdom. The Greatest Paradox Christianity as the religion of all Europe and America ana of great peoples in other continents has added to the personal and domestic message of Christmas one of peace and good will to all men, and some have found in the state of the world today a proof of the failure of Christianity. It has painfully to be admitted that the military history of Christianity is long and cruel. It almost seems sometimes as though nations, having risen above the conception of a tribal God, had substituted that of a tribal Christ, who came to save sinners under one flag and damn those under another. There are Christians who act as though that were the truth; but though they may be good and moral men they lack the first element of the Christmas spirit. Yet here, too, it is fair to add that it is intellect that deceives them., not ill will. Man’s cruelty to man is rarely in his soul. The greatest paradox of our times is that a world that is fresh from the suffering of the last war and resignedly enduring another should

also be a world in which there is more tenderness and more sympathy with the underdog than at any time in history before. It all means that the schools have, after all, done their work less well for the mass of men than nature and the Church for the individual, and that the mechanism of our life has grown beyond the sense of direction. There is no way to world peace that does not begin in the toleration and humility of the Christian charity which is the spirit of Christmas. If much has so far been said here of the pagan element in our Christmas observance, it is in no sense of overlooking the main fact that the spirit of Christmas is in the Christian religion. On the contrary, the gap between theory and practice, most evident at this period, is one that only faith can bridge. Here is perhaps the greatest problem of our time. Once the Church was League of Nations, civil service, judiciary all in one; its officers were even the equivalent of what is now called big business; its priests scourged the greatest kings of the world. Yet it missed founding the city cl God on earth. Moral and Secular % No one likes the political priest or wants even what was once called the Nonconformist Conscience back to its old activity amongst us. Yet sometimes one cannot

help wishing that there were some natural division between the moral and the secular aspects of politics so that the Church could direct the one in accordance with the principles of religion' while the secular power rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. One car imagine circumstances in which one half of the beneficience of modern politics might be better in the hands of the Churches. It is a reproach to our modem politics that though Christianity is part of the law of the land one may survey them for a year without being conscious of any public appeal to its principles. Fidelity to other law comes out in the open to be praised; but to this supreme law fidelity is praised and breaches condemned only obliquely and by inference. And yet one of the lessons of these sad latter days is the unexpected strength of the Puritan tradition amongst us, not in its old joylessness, indeed, but on what one may call the nation’s flag. The conscience of the country in its national affairs may have different standards from those of private life; international morality is lower than that of the worst slums in the single state; and the differences between nations in this respect are of form rather than of substance.