The Feast of St. Friend | Page 4

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 home to us the truth that in spite of all the differences which we have invented, mankind is a fellowship of brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful mysteries, and dependent upon mutual goodwill and trust for the happiness it may hope to achieve. * * * Let us remember that Christmas is, among other things,