12
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•l* \ \ I \\ If fiaNECHr KVPRECHT
fwy— I,!, the world
/ Christ
/ tfL-Jfti nias i ' a y- From
i g" ta the Innd of the
midnight sun
rfißß A to the sunny
% if south of per-
J IMr petual summer
P But in the lung
w~ distance there
kept. Itß cele
bration is a part of the universal
liistory of the human race. What
ever may have been its origin and
whatever peculiarities may have
gathered about it.in its adaptation
to different people and different
circumstances, it is to us Ameri
cans today a practically national
feast.
To keep it was at one time, and
in our own part of the country, it
is true, a penal offense. It was
thought to savor of prelacy and to
foster unpleasant memories of po
litical servitude. But it has grown
with our growth and the broad
mindedness of the American
people is seen at its best in the
hearty commemoration of the na
tivity of the Christ from year to
year.
In some parts of the country, in
fact, Christmas day bids fair to
supplant Thanksgiving day, and it
certainly may already claim an
equality of recognition with the
time-honored national festival of
our New England forbears. People
of every creed and every nation
ality within our borders delight to
participate in the celebration of
the Christmas feast, and many a
scion of old-world stock finds him
self back home again as the church
bells peal and the candles glim
mer on the Christmas trees. It is
a time of universal peace and
good will. It brightens homes,
softens asperities and uplifts us
as it brings "the light that never
was on land or sea."
The Origin Unknown.
The origin of the festival is said
to be lost in antiquity. If, as held
by many, it is a Christian feast grafted onto
a pagan one, its history is age long. The ac
tual institution of Christmas as the celebra
tion of the nativity of Jesus Christ dates from
the second century of the Christian era. St.
Chrysostom says that it was observed from
the beginning, according to western practice,
from Thrace to the Straits of Gibraltar, and
he calls it"the most venerable, the mother of
all the rest."
But as to the time of the celebration there
was a diversity of observance. The early
Christian church naturally kept Easter as com
memorative of the resurrection of Christ,
which the apostles were especially chosen and
instructed to proclaim, and the feast of Pen
tecost, which became the birthday of the
church, came next in order. Then to these
were added two others, the one commemora
tive of the baptism of Jesus Christ and the
other of his birth. The first of these, the
Epiphany, or Manifestation, came from the
east to the west. The second, Christmas, or
the nativity, came from the west to the east.
The two were officially recognized and quite
widely kept in both the east and west in the
fourth century. In a sermon preached by the
Golden-Mouthed in Antioch on December 25,
A. D. 386, he speaks of the festival of Christ
mas as having first become known there 10
years before and on another occasion he in
vites his hearers to participate in its ap
proaching observance.
But as to the reason for the selection of
December 25 as Christmas day, first arrived at
by the Hippolytes, there is much difference of
opinion. It is held by some that the German
name of the festival "Weihnacht," is a literal
translation of the Hebrew "Chanuka," the
Jewish festival of the purification of the
temple by Judas Maccabeus, which begins on
December 17, and that as the Passover and
Pentecost were perpetuated in Easter and
Whitsuntide, so the festival of the Purification
lias been preserved in Christmastide and the
practice of burning candles on the Christmas
trees has come from the old Hebrew feast.
Early Festivals.
But the Purification can hardly be num
bered among the greater and important festi
vals of the Hebrews and, as Schaff says, there
is really no Old Testament feast correspond
ing to our Christmas. The n«seht of opinion
as to the time of year chiseii by the Chris
tian church in the west lies in another and
entirely different solution of the question and
links the Christian observance to the ancient
practice of the heathen world.
It must be remembered in this connection
that the particular date was first fixed upon
by. the Roman branch of the church, and at
that season of the year a series of pagan fes
tivals occurred which were closely interwoven
with the civil and social life of the Roman
people. These festivals had an import which
lent itself to the growth of the Christian
faith, and they may have been spiritually
adopted by the church in order to counteract
their evil tendencies and at the same time ad
vance the cause of the new religion.
The Saturnalia, for instance, represented
the peaceful times of the golden age and abol
ished sharp 'distinctions between citizen and
serf. But it was a time of wild and unholy
revelry. Then the Brumalia —the feast of the
shortest day, or winter solstice —was the com
memoration of the birthday of the new sun
about to return to the earth. It was the "dies
natalis invicti solis." I:: the old mythology of
the sun worshipers it was the birthday of
Methras himself, and, in fact, the time of year
when from unnumbered ages before the Chris
tian era pagan Europe, in all its tribes and
peoples, had celebrated its chief festival. So
here we have the double truth of the golden
age and the rebirth of the unconquered sun,
as he breaks the power of darkness, refined
and enriched in the Christian teaching of
"peace on earth and good will to men," as
coincident with the rising of the Sun of
Righteousness in the birth into the world of
the son of the peasant woman who was also
the Son of God.
This view of Christmas accentuates the
true place of the Christian religion in relation
to the ancient and deep-seated religions which
preceded it, and at the same time reveals a
beauty of development in its culmination as
the completed manifestation of God toman.
In the infancy of the race the winter solstice
was everywhere a season of rejoicing. No
matter what the peculiar form which it as
sumed. it expressed the world joy of the time.
So the very idea of the Child God which gives
Christmas its meaning may not only have been
foretold by sybil and seer and prophet, but
prefigured by the infant gods of the Greek and
Egyptian and Hindu and Buddhist forms of
religion.
These to us imperfect aD unsatisfactory
conceptions of the Di
vine may have been the
rude but honest efforts
of the earlier days of the
human race to group the
idea of a God-man which
has been made so real
and so full of joy to us
in the Nativity and the
Epiphany of the Christ.
In this sense the early
church may have been
wiser than she wot of.
Her aim was to select
the best features of the
heathen feasts and em
body them for their puri
fication in Christian
practices and sacred
rites and to wean the
converts from their old
superstitions to the
deeper and more real
truths of the Christian
faith.
But in so doing she
may have been the un
conscious instrument of
a divinely guided evolu
tion in religious practice
and belief which has en
nobled and enriched the
world. The symbolism
of our Christmas to-day
certainly lends itself in
many ways to this point
of view. In the greenery
with which we deck our
houses and churches and
in the gift-laden fir trees
which gladden our chil
dren's hearts, we still re
tain the symbols by
which our heathen fore
fathers signified their
faith in the power of re
turning sun to clothe the
earth with green and
hang new fruit on the
trees. The Christmas
carol may be a new
birth of the hymns of
the Saturnalfa. The
holly and mistletoe
came from the Druid
CAMERON COUNTY PRESS, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1909.
"Yule" of "Merrie England" is the old Teu
tonic name of the religious festival of the win
ter solstice, during which Celt and Roman
could trace the movements of their deities as
they walked abroad in the world.
The Story Christmas Tells.
The Christian religion is not merely some
thing built over the old ethnic religions as the
church of St. Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome is
built over the ruins of the old heathen temple
of Minerva, or as the grove sacred to Adonis
was planted by the order of the Emperor Had
rian over "the cave close to the village" which
is now honored as the .scene of the Saviour's
birth. It had a larger and a deeper meaning.
Christmas tells the story of a gradual but
complete unfolding of the divine idea of relig
ion as seen in the Christ Child, of its worship
and its merry-making in its at once sacred
and social feast.
The story is told simply but graphically by
two of the four evangelists. St. Mark's gospel
begins with the baptism of the Christ, so log
ically he had no need to tell the story of his
birth and boyhood. St. John wrote near the
close of the first century, and with the domi
nant idea of settnig forth the divinity of
Christ in opposition to the prevailing gnosti-
°ri9M^W||Ke
Oktot CUiitftltna/ tl^miv
VI -IN EVERY Roman Catholic church and in probably
® ¥ ninety-and-nine out of every hundred Protestant
piJt-aa churches throughout Christendom this is the sea
son when is heard that grand old hymn whose
tender and solemn strains find an echo in the
universal human heart —"Adeste Fideles" (Come, All Ye
Faithful). It is the anthem sung at high mass at Christ
mastide for centuries past, calling Christ's worshipers to
Bethlehem, where the new-born Savior lies.
This naive and beautiful Latin anthem is more ancient
than its history, and goes back six or seven centuries.
Saint Bonaventura, an Italian monk of the thirteenth cen
tury, who (lied in Lyons, France, in 1274, is credited with
the authorship of the beginning:
Adeste fideles,
Laeti triumphantes,
Venite, Venite in Bethlehem.
Natum videte, Regem angelorum. *
Venite adoremus,
Venite adoremus,
Venite adoremus Dominum.
Oh, come all ye faithful,
Joyful and triumphant,
Oh, come ye, oh, come ye to Bethlehem.
See the new-born Saviour, king of all the angels.
Oh, come let us adore him,
Oh, come let us adore him.
Oh, come let us {idore him, Christ, our Lord.
Saint Bonaventura was a Franciscan scholastic philos
worship. The banquet
time itself may be a sur
vival, purified and refined,
of the original feast to
the gods and goddesses of
the fabled Olympus. The
opher, and was "Doctor Seraphicus." His pre
served writings are of a dogmatic or didactic nature ex
clusively, and this hymn is not to be found among them.
Doubtless it is to be referred to the seraphic side of his
genius and temperament. Its classic Latin cadences are
of such lyric felicity that one cannot help but believe
they were written to the noble and touching melody cn
whose wings they have floated to our time. Surely this is
not too fantastic a suggestion, when it is remembered that
the original Greek music of the Delphic hymn to Apollo
is preserved intact, and that certain familiar phrases of
the Gregorian chant, used to-day in the Roman mass, are
identified by Hebrew historians as the same which were
sung in Solomon's temple many centuries before the time
of Christ.
The hymn "Adeste Fideles" is not known to have been
used in England earlier than the seventeenth century.
The musical setting, as we have it in modern notation, is
ascribed by Novello to one John Reading, who was
organist at Winchester cathedral from 1675 to 1681, and
later at Winchester college. Its real origin is lost in the
mists of antiquity which probably far antedates the middle
ages and the Latin verses to which it has been insep
arably wedded.
Word-language reaches but the one people or race to
whom it is directly addressed. But the language of music
is universal —it is "understanded of the people" instantly
all the wide world over —it needs not to be written in
choice Latin nor translated into many tongues—it is
caught up from the heart and echoes on forever. That is
why the "Adeste Fideles" has become the Christmas
hymn of all the world.
cisra of the time. But St. Matthew,
whose narrative bears traces of hav
ing been gleaned from Joseph and St.
Luke, who probably got his informa
tion from Mary, have given us the
story with a directness and a human
ness which the grotesque and often
meretricious wonder-tales of the apoc
ryphal gospels have but served to ac
centuate as a dark background to a
touching and reverent picture.
Around the story legends natu
rally gathered. It was the custom in
early days to decorate in this way
the graves of heroes and some of
these legends are no doubt the off
spring of the "vulgar tattle" of the
apocryphal gospel stories. In some
parts of the world the bees are said
to sing on Christmas eve. The cattle
kneel in honor of the manger-bed at
Bethlehem. The sheep go in proces
sion in commemoration of the angels'
visit to the shepherds. The Indians
creep through the winter woods of
Canada to see the deer kneel and
look up to the Great Spirit. In the
German Alps the cattle are thought
to have the gift of language, and the
story Is told of an Alpine farmer's servant
who hid in the stable on Chrstmas eve and
heard the horses talking about his own death,
which followed a few days later.
A Bosnian Legend.
There is a Bosnian legend that the sun
leaps in the heavens and the stars dance
around it. A great peace comes stealing down
over mountain and forest. The rotten stumps
stand straight and green on the hillside. The
grass is beilowered with blossoms and the
birds sing 011 the mountain tops in thanks to
God. In Poland the heavens open and Jacob's
ladder is set up between earth and sky. In
Austria the candles are set in the window, that
the Christ Child may not stumble when he
comes to bless the home. In north Germany
the tables are spread and the lights left burn
ing for the Virgin Alary and her attending
angel.
The English superstition is admirably
voiced by the myriad-minded Shakespeare in
"Hamlet:"
Some say that ever 'gainst that season conies
Wherein our Lord's birt,h is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long,
And then they say no spirit can walk abroad.
The nights are wholesome. Then no planets strike,
No fairy lakes, nor witch hath power to charm.
So hallowed and so gracious is the time."
If a man will compliment his wife upon her
youthful appearance and tell her that he loves
her, she will forgive other white lies.
SOME IDEAS FOR DECORATIONS
How to Make the Home Look Bright
and Cheerful for the
Holidays.
In massing holly for use on the
Christmas table It repays one to wipe
off the leaves with a cloth dipped in a
very little olivo oil, says the Housekeep
er. Tall candles should light the feast
and the holly leaves reflect the twink
ling lights in a beautiful manner. If
a chandelier hangs over the dining
table a feature which will delight the
children is to have a nosegay of arti
ficial flowers suspended from the chan
delier to within a foot of the 'table by
means of a red ribbon. This bouquet
should have the paper puff of the old
time fashion, and the bouquet itself
will be found to be a shower bouquet,
one small noseegay for each person,
in the depths of which some trifling
gift is hidden. /
Snowballs of cotton, tightly wound
with white ribbon, also conceal gifts
most attractively, while the cheap but
pretty little Santa Claus candy boxes,
for sale at favor shops, are effective
upon the Christmas table, and will
hold quite a good-sized package, or, of
course, may be used to hold the bon
bons for which they are intended. For
a luncheon or high tea during Christ
mas week, a beautiful table may be
set by employing the use of green
linen runners embroidered in white.
A holly bell or a bunch of red carna
tions in a cut-glass vase will touch
the center of the table to brilliancy
and soft garlands of southern mos3
may lightly edge the linen runners,
or doilies if they be used instead.
The colonial glass candlesticks are
still in favor, aqd nothing is more at
tractive in a country house. With tall
green or red tapers, a group of these
candlesticks placed in a mass of holly
as a centerpiece is both appropriate
and beautiful.
A quaint little Christmas tree may
be used as a centerpiece by procuring
at the florist's a little "pepper plant,"
which has lovely green leaves and red
berries. Wound with glittering tinsel
and tied with candied fruits held in
place with wee baby ribbons, or
hung with little favors of French jew
elry or articles of trifling worth, the
little tree makes a centerpiece of
charm.
"THE PRINCE OF PEACE"
His Wonderful Influence Continues
and Widens Through the
World.
All the old troublous questions of
the origin and destination of the Gali
lee Carpenter have passed, notes a
writer in Collier's. All the mediaeval
worriment in discriminating between
human and divine has gone, all the
puzzled inquiry into the miraculous.
No longer is mankind stirred over the
non-essential. Theories of him fade
away, dogmas of his nature lose their
charm. His gentleness has conquered.
His influence continues and widens.
Slowly brightening, the gleam that
touched him spreads through the
world. His spirit moves on the face
of civilization, and makes it kindlier
every generation. The touch of his
hand is on the grief-stricken. Nurse,
physician, and nun are the messen
gers of his teaching. The vestal fires
burned out, but never the fires of his
spirit, which answer each other from
mountain-top to mountain-top across
the continents. And deep in the heart
of the people they make family life
sweeter and ease the bitterness of
failure and ignorance and all life's in
completeness. That wonder-working
personality was never so potent as to
day—so insistent and tenderly sure.
Under a thousand forms, creeds and
names, men serve him. And however
far we go in the conquest of nature,
identifying the north pole, climbing
the sky, prying open electrical forces,
mapping out the subliminal, diminish
ing sin, disease, war, poverty, igno
rance—always in the advance will be
that gracious figure of the Sinless One,
who showed Love as the rule of life.
One Perfect Man —ardent and gentle—
the race will never tire of him.
BY SIZES
r - N
s >
Some people expect so much more
than others. —Life.
Origin of Gift-Giving.
It is believed by many that our cus
tom of giving gifts at Christmas
comes from an old custom of priests
putting on board of all outgoing ships
a box of alms. This box was opened
at Christmas-time, and masses said
for the giving of alms, and it was
called a "Christ Mass" box. From
this has come our custom of giving
boxes and gifts.
The Man in the Moon.
Russian folk-lore tells that the man
in the moon was one who was seeking
the isle in which there is no death.
At last, after traveling far, he found
the lahged-for haven and took up his
abod© in the moon. After a hundred
years had passed, death called for him
one Christmas eve and a fierce strug
gle ensued with the moon, who was
victorious; and so the man stayad
where he was.