The Feast of St. Friend | Page 4

for ever reminding them that, without
the Christmas spirit, they are lost. The forms of faith change, but the
spirit of faith, which is the Christmas spirit, is immortal amid its
endless vicissitudes. At a crisis of change, faith is weakened for the
majority; for the majority it may seem to be dead. It is conserved,
however, in the hearts of the few supremely great and in the hearts of
the simple. The supremely great are hidden from the majority; but the
simple are seen of all men, and them we encourage, often without
knowing why, to be the depositaries of that which we cannot ourselves
guard, but which we dimly feel to be indispensable to our safety.

THREE
THE SOLSTICE AND GOOD WILL
In order to see that there is underlying Christmas an idea of faith which
will at any rate last as long as the planet lasts, it is only necessary to ask
and answer the question: "Why was the Christmas feast fixed for the

twenty-fifth of December?" For it is absolutely certain, and admitted by
everybody of knowledge, that Christ was not born on the twenty-fifth
of December. Those disturbing impassioned inquirers after truth, who
will not leave us peaceful in our ignorance, have settled that for us, by
pointing out, among other things, that the twenty-fifth of December
falls in the very midst of the Palestine rainy season, and that, therefore,
shepherds were assuredly not on that date watching their flocks by
night.
* * * * *
Christians were not, at first, united in the celebration of Christmas.
Some kept Christmas in January, others in April, others in May. It was
a pre-Christian force which drove them all into agreement upon the
twenty-fifth of December. Just as they wisely took the Christmas tree
from the Roman Saturnalia, so they took the date of their festival from
the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when
mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness,
when the night begins to decrease and the day to increase, when the
year turns, and hope is born again because the worst is over. No more
suitably symbolic moment could have been chosen for a festival of
faith, goodwill and joy. And the appositeness of the moment is just as
perfect in this era of electric light and central heating, as it was in the
era of Virgil, who, by the way, described a Christmas tree. We shall say
this year, with exactly the same accents of relief and hope as our pagan
ancestors used, and as the woaded savage used: "The days will begin to
lengthen now!" For, while we often falsely fancy that we have
subjugated nature to our service, the fact is that we are as irremediably
as ever at the mercy of nature.
* * * * *
Indeed, the attitude of us moderns towards the forces by which our
existence is governed ought to be, and probably is, more reverent and
awe-struck than that of the earlier world. The discoveries of science
have at once quickened our imagination and compelled us to admit that
what we know is the merest trifle. The pagan in his ignorance explained
everything. Our knowledge has only deepened the mystery, and all that

we shall learn will but deepen it further. We can explain the solstice.
We are aware with absolute certitude that the solstice and the equinox
and the varying phenomena of the seasons are due to the fact that the
plane of the equator is tilted at a slight angle to the plane of the ecliptic.
When we put on the first overcoat in autumn, and when we give orders
to let the furnace out in spring, we know that we are arranging our lives
in accordance with that angle. And we are quite duly proud of our
knowledge. And much good does our knowledge do us!
* * * * *
Well, it does do us some good, and in a spiritual way, too! For nobody
can even toy with astronomy without picturing to himself, more clearly
and startlingly than would be otherwise possible, a revolving globe that
whizzes through elemental space around a ball of fire: which, in turn, is
rushing with all its satellites at an inconceivable speed from nowhere to
nowhere; and to the surface of the revolving, whizzing globe a
multitude of living things desperately clinging, and these living things,
in the midst of cataclysmic danger, and between the twin enigmas of
birth and death, quarrelling and hating and calling themselves kings
and queens and millionaires and beautiful women and aristocrats and
geniuses and lackeys and superior persons! Perhaps the highest value of
astronomy is that it renders more vivid the ironical significance of such
a vision, and thus brings