Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

the first one to say, "I wish you a Merry Christmas," to my playmates; and they were very anxious to be the first to say it to me. That was all there was to Christmas in my boyhood. I never received a Christmas present; and I remember well that, if any presents were to be given at this time of the year, they were always New Year's presents, never Christmas presents.

Dickens has done very much by his writings to not only broaden, but deepen and heighten the meaning, the power, the beauty, the glory, of this time of peace on earth and good will to men. It has come to be a time when not only the Church treats it as a church festival, but a time when believers of all shades are apparently interested in it, one as much as another; when people of all beliefs and of no belief vie to celebrate that in it which is divinest because it is most human.

But I preached a Christmas sermon last Sunday, some of you may be thinking, and it savors a little too much of one theme for me to bring it up again to-day. And you may be asking why I give a second Sunday out of the year to touching on this again.

I will tell you why. There is such a wide-spread, popular ignorance as to the origin, the nature, the meaning, of the day, that I find myself amazed and astonished as I talk with people. A representative of one of the leading newspapers of the city called on me the other day, and was utterly surprised to find out that Christmas was older than the birth of Jesus, or that it was ever celebrated beyond the limits of Christendom. So, by means of letters that come to me from over the country, by means of the questions asked of me by those I meet, by means of newspapers, I find that the idea is spread abroad continually that Christmas is a peculiarly Christian institution, and that it belongs to the orthodox section of Christendom at that. I find some extremely radical, sceptical people asking me why I keep Christmas, it seeming to them that it is a sort of half dishonest, or at any rate inconsistent, conformity on my

part, as though I wished to gain a little of the credit of this great religious festival.

On the other hand, the extremely orthodox ask why I keep Christmas, it seeming to them that no one has any right to the day unless he believes that Jesus was the second person in an eternal trinity, born of a virgin mother on the twentyfifth day of December, eighteen hundred and ninety years ago. So, I say, this misconception is exceedingly widespread.

I wish to give you one illustration of it. I hold in my hand a copy of last Sunday's Globe. I took it because it happened to be accessible. It has a quotation from an elaborate article by Mr. Talmage, published in the Christmas number of the Ladies' Home Journal, which, scattered by the thousand over the whole country, carries a wrong idea, coming as it does from a source popularly supposed to be accurate. It begins, "Centuries ago, two plain people stopped in a village barn after a walk of eighty miles, too long a trudge for one in poor health," as though Mary had just walked eighty miles! Later, he goes on:—

"I have always rejoiced that Christ was born on a December night. Had it been the month of May, that is the season of blossoms; had He been born in the month of June, that is the season of roses; had He been born in the month of July, that is the season of great harvests; had He been born in the month of September, that is the season of ripe orchards; had He been born in the month of October, that is the season for upholstered forests.

"But He was born in the month of December, when there are no flowers blooming out-of-doors, and when all the harvests that have not been gathered up have perished, and when there are no fruits ripening on the hill, and when the leaves are drifted over the bare earth.

"It was in closing December that He was born, to show that this is a Christ for people in sharp blast, for people under a clouded sky, for people with frosted hopes, for people with the thermometer below zero, for people snowed under.

"That is the reason He is so often found among the destitute: you can find Him on any night coming off the moors, you can see Him any night coming through the dark lanes of the city, you can see Him putting His hand under the fainting head in the pauper's cabin.

"He remembers how the wind whistled around the caravansary in Bethlehem that December night, and He is in sympathy with all those who in their poverty hear the shutters clatter on a cold night.”

This is scattered broadcast all over the country as an expression of intelligent opinion concerning the origin, the nature, and the meaning of Christmas. I grant that the sentiment of it, the pity for the poor, the belief that there is sympathy up there for the poor down here,- this is all sweet and tender and true. But why need this eternal faith of the human heart be linked in with what Mr. Talmage either knows is untrue or else shows an ignorance that should unfit one to attempt to teach what is true?

It seems to me that these intellectual misconceptions should be corrected for the sake of clear thought; but there is a meaning and a need deeper than that. For, when the average man feels that God has selected him out of all the world to confer upon him some special mark of his peculiar favor, it sometimes does not make him humble as it ought to if it were true, and anxious to share his blessing with all mankind. It leads him, on the contrary, to draw his garments a little more closely about him, lest he come in contact with somebody who has not been so favored.

These intellectual misconceptions breed division, separation; they bar sympathy; they create prejudice on the part of the Christian against those in the world that are looked upon as having been neglected of the Father who is in heaven. For the sake, then, of clear thought, for the sake of trying to break down these barriers that make a certain section of the world feel "I am holier than thou," it seems to me well worth while to give one Sunday morning to a careful and accurate setting forth of this theme.

What, then, do we know about the birth of Jesus? Popularly, it is assumed, by articles like this that I have quoted from the Sunday paper, that Christmas originated eighteen hundred and ninety years ago on the 25th of December. But what do we know about the birth of Jesus?

The only things that we know with any certainty are, first, that he was not born in the year 1 of our era, and that he was not born on the twenty-fifth day of December. We know beyond question that neither of these assumptions is true. Lest any one should suppose I am giving only the sceptics' side of the argument or the rationalists' view, or that I am making a one-sided statement, I shall ask your attention to several quotations from orthodox writers. The first is from Canon Farrar's "Life of Christ." He says:

"Although the day of Christ's birth cannot be fixed with absolute certainty, there is at least a large amount of evidence to render it probable that he was born four years before our present era. It is universally admitted that our received chronology, which is not older than Dionysius Exiguus (about A.D. 526), in the sixth century, is wrong. But all attempts to discover the month and the day are useless. No data whatever exist to enable us to determine them with even approximate accuracy." ("Life of Christ," pp. 673, 674.)

Geikie, in his "Life of Christ" (vol. i. p. 559), says, “The whole subject is very uncertain." Ewald appears to fix the date of his birth at five years earlier than our era. Petavius and Usher fix it on the 25th of December, five years before our era; Bengel, on the 25th of December, four years before our era; Auger and Winer, four years before our era, in the spring; Scaliger, three years before our era, in October; Saint Jerome, three years before our era, on December 25; Eusebius, two years before our era, on January 6; and Idler, seven years before our era, in December.

Dr. Albert Barnes, in his "Notes on the Gospels," says: "The Jews sent out their flocks into the mountainous and desert regions during the summer months, and took them up

in the latter part of October or the first of November, when the cold weather commenced. It is clear from this that our Saviour was born before the 25th of December, or before what we call Christmas. At that time it is cold, and especially in the high and mountainous regions about Bethlehem. God has concealed the time of his birth. There is no way to ascertain it. By different learned men it has been fixed at each month in the year." (Barnes's "Notes,” vol. ii. p. 402.)

The institution of the festival of the birth of Jesus on the 25th of December has been attributed to Telesphorus, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, A.D. 138 to 161; but there is no certain trace of it until A.D. 180-192, under Commodus. While certain sections of the Church as early as the latter part of that century had fixed on the 25th of December, it was not generally accepted throughout Christendom until the year 526; that is, during the sixth century.

You will note, then, that it is not simply the opinion of rational or liberal critics, but of orthodox critics, that the subject is involved in hopeless uncertainty. I think the best authorities agree that in all probability Jesus was born four or five years before the beginning of our present era. So much is practically clear. In regard to the month, nobody knows anything whatever, beyond the fact that it is absurd to suppose that he was born in December. If the tradition has any basis, which tells us about the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks, and that is the earliest thing that we know about it, we know that during the cold and rainy winter the flocks and shepherds would not have been exposed to the inclement weather.

Having settled so much, then, I now wish to ask your attention, before I trace the origin of the day, to the widespread celebration of a festival at this time of the year. In India so far back that it is beyond any authentic history we find them celebrating a festival at this time of the year, having their houses decorated with evergreens, as we decorate them now, and exchanging gifts among friends.

[ocr errors]
« AnteriorContinuar »