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 GOLDWIN SMITH. 
 
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 O. BLAOKETT ROBINSON, PRINTER. B JORDAN SCREET. TORONTO 
 
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Keeping Christmas, 
 
 
 -♦♦-♦- 
 
 **pHRISTMAS comes but once a year " were words farai- 
 ^ liar and dear to English childhood. They were uttered 
 by the band of mummers who came into the halls of the gen- 
 try on Christmas Eve to exhibit their rude traditional dis- 
 guises and play their uncouth antics, earning thereby 
 the half-crowns wherewith to make themselves a merry 
 Christmas. If you had traced the pedigree of the mum- 
 ers, probably you would have found that they, like Punch, 
 represented the actors of some mediaeval mystery or 
 morality play, now fallen in its estate, since the Church 
 of the Middle Ages, with all its sacred pageantry and 
 dramaturgy, had passed away. Punch will die only with 
 Shakespeare, but the mummers probably by this time the 
 policeman of a refined civilization has ordered to " move 
 on." Besides the roughness and absurdity of the exhi- 
 bition, these fooleries enacted by the lower class to amuse 
 the upper class and draw money from them did smack 
 somewhat of the old regime and even reminded one a little 
 of the Saturnalia of the Roman slave. More than two 
 centuries before, Puritanism had banished forever the Lord 
 of Misrule, under whose reign of tipsy jollity and folly 
 the lawyers of the Temple were once fined for having 
 failed to perform their customary dance before the judges. 
 The Lord of Misrule, while he lasted, was kept up in a style 
 incredibly elaborate and expensive. He had a mimic court, 
 with officers answering to those of the real court, and for 
 
 i " 
 
KRKPINfJ CHRISTMAS. 
 
 a season ruled the realm of pleasure as absolutely as the 
 monarch whom ho counterfeited and partly supplanted 
 ruled the State. Mr. Francis Vivian, who was Lord of 
 Misrule or Christmas Prince in the reign of Charles [., 
 spent X2,000, equivalent probably to $100,000 now, on the 
 maintenance of his mock dignity, besides his allowance from 
 the Crown. To all this the more serious and austere 
 spirit which was then gaining ascendancy in Merrie Eng- 
 land was fatal, and the Restoration, though it brought 
 back the May-pole, failed to revive such laborious and 
 thoroughly antiquated tomfoolery as the reign of the Lord 
 of Misrule. " Our Christmas Lords of Misrule," says 
 Prynne, ** together with dancing, masques, mummeries, 
 stage-playing, and such other Christmas disorders now in 
 USM with Christians were derived from these Roman Satur- 
 nalia and Bacchanalian festivals, which should cause all 
 pious Christians eternally to abominate them." The words 
 are quoted in Mr. Hervey's " Book of Christmas," where 
 all the lore concerning the Lord of Misrule will be found. 
 Prynne is right in connecting the reign of Misrule, 
 morally at least, with the Saturnalia ; it was not only 
 a vast " spree," but, like the Saturnalia, a temporary 
 relief from the rigidities of social arrangements and a sort 
 of social safety-valve at the same time. Another festival 
 which used to be kept in England when the writer was a 
 boy, and which had a strong and most pathetic tinge of the 
 Saturnalia, was the festival of the chimney sweeps on the 
 first of May. Those hapless boys, mostly parish appren- 
 tices, and the lowest and most miserable slaves of civiliza- 
 
 
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 KEKPINC CIIIUSTMAS. 
 
 tion, had that one privileged day of merriment and feast- 
 ing in the year. They used to dance on the lawn round 
 " Jack in the Green," clattering their I)ru8he8 and wooden 
 shovels, after which they were regaled by the charitable 
 with beef and plum-pudding. Happily that caste of 
 misery and degradation has now ceased to exist. If the 
 mummers have departed, let us hope the " Waits " have not 
 departed with them. Their music was hardly an equiva- 
 lent, especially in the rural parishes, for the song of the 
 angelic choir heralding the nativity, which presumably it 
 professed to reproduce. But its sound in the dead of night 
 made a strong impression, half awful, half pleasant, on the 
 ear of childhood. 
 
 Sunday and Christmas are now pretty much in the 
 same position as institutions which have lost or are fast 
 losing their old theological basis, but rest securely on a 
 basis of another kind. Ic is impossible to insist on the 
 obligation of keeping the Jewish Sabbath, the day on which 
 the Creator rested after the six days' work of Creation, 
 especially as we do not keep it, our Sunday being the first 
 day of the week and not the seventh. But the Sabbath 
 has glided into the Day of Rest, of spiritual rest for 
 those who are spiritually minded, of rest at all events for 
 all, and of Sabbath stillness after the noise and bustle of 
 the week. The French Revolutionists, when they undertook 
 to make new heavens and a new earth on the principles of 
 Reason and Rousseau, substituting the tenth day for the 
 seventh, found it would not do. Sunday has ceased to be 
 an article of the law, but it remains an article of human 
 
r 
 
 O KKEPIN'(; OFIIIISTMA.S. 
 
 nature. So it is with Christmas. Christians in the 
 Middlo An[f3s thought that they were keeping the actual 
 birthday of the Saviour, as they thought when they went 
 on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem that they saw the identical 
 spots where the scenes of His Passion had been enacted 
 and the Sepulchre in which Ho had been laid. We know 
 that the day of Christ's birth is totally uncertain. Clement 
 of Alexandria, a Father of the second century, speaks 
 of those who affected to assign the day as " over curious," 
 and his confession of ignorance is decisive. All attempts to 
 settle the point by reference to historical landmarks, to 
 ecclesiastical tradition, or to the shepherd's calendar are 
 vain. Probably the time of the winter solstice, the birthday 
 of the year, was fixed on for the nativity of the Sun of 
 Righteousness. The old Latin hymns seem almost to 
 admit as much by coupling the coming of the Saviour with 
 the return of light. Not only the day of Christ's birth but 
 the year is uncertain, and the French Revolutionists had 
 that fact upon their side when, proceeding to regenerate 
 chronology as well as society, they substituted for the 
 Christian era that of the enthronement of Reason, personi- 
 fied by a prostitute, on the altar of Notre Dame. Never- 
 theless, we let this article of the medireval calendar stand, 
 and still on the traditional day celebrate the bin., of Chris- 
 tianity and of all that Christianity has brought with it to 
 society, to the home, and to the heart. Even those who in 
 this critical and sceptical age have ceased to be Christians in 
 name may celebrate the festival of humanity. For they 
 can hardly deny that it was with Christianity that the 
 
KEEPING CHRISTMAS. 7 
 
 aenst! of a common humanity and of the brotherhood of 
 man with all its duties and charities, and with the civiliza- 
 tion which is grounded on it, came into the world. A 
 Greek philosopher might point out the close fellowship 
 which united mankind ; but that same philosopher pro- 
 nounced slavery an ordinance of nature, and when he spoke 
 of mankind probably thought only of the free. That 
 there were no hospitals or alms houses before Christ may not 
 be strictly true ; but it is certain that there was nothing in 
 ancient civilization like the vast system of Christian chari- 
 ties. The Comtist religion of Humanity, . j-mgh it presents 
 itself as a new creation, is, as has been oftf ii and fully said, 
 nothing but Roman Catholic Christi*. ity, ^vith a :.ew net 
 of saints, sacraments and festivals. Those vho cannot keep 
 Christmas Day as the holiday of a revrahd religion may 
 Keep it as the holiday and the ann'ial renewal of human 
 brotherhood, social beneficence, and family atfection. 
 
 Suppose some vestiges and relics of heathenism do 
 mingle with our mode of keeping the Christian feast ; 
 suppose the Yule log does represent the sacred fire of 
 pagan superstition and remind us of the scene in a Scan- 
 dinavian hall, where our rugged progenitors quaffed their 
 mead and sung their rude drinking songs amidst the 
 trophies of wild tribal war. Suppose the mistletoe is the 
 mystical plant of the Druid, though it is dilficult to see 
 how the connection can be traced between Druidism 
 and kissing. All this only widens the circle of historic 
 association and makes the festival in a larger sense human. 
 Even the most orthodox among us have by this time 
 
 il 
 
i 
 
 KEEPING CHRISTMAS. 
 
 pretty well discarded the narrow theology, uncountenanced 
 by any rational construction of the Gospel, which puts the 
 heathen out of the pale of salvation and consigns them to 
 the power of evil for not having heard a word which was 
 never preached to them or believed in miraculous events 
 which had not then taken place. We recognize the 
 debt which the civilization of which we are the heirs owes 
 to its earliest and rudest founders. We recognize the 
 debt which Christian Ethics owe to Socrates, Plato, Mar- 
 cus Aurelius, and Epictetus. We scout the monkish mor- 
 ality which consigns virtuous pagans, with one or two 
 arbitrary exceptions, to eternal torments. We have en- 
 larged the bounds of Christendom to the full compass of 
 the designation ** Son of Man." 
 
 It is in vain that the Puritan has tried to dislodge the 
 Papistical, Prelatieal, and heathen Christmas by substi- 
 tuting for it Thanksgiving Day. His failure is almost as 
 signal as that of the Jacobins in their attempt to substi- 
 tute the birthday of their Republic for the birthday of 
 Christendom. A holiday of any kind is always popular, 
 and it is very meet and right that we should express 
 pious gratitude for the ingathering of the harvest. But 
 who, except the heirs of the Puritans, cares very much, 
 about Thanksgiving Day 1 With what tender and hal- 
 lowed associations is its name encircled 1 Who particularly 
 wishes on that day to gather all whom he loves around 
 him, or calls up with special fondness the image of those 
 whom he has lost 1 To see a man eating his Christmas din- 
 ner alone at a club makes one shudder. Would the sight 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
 KEEPING CHRISTMAS. 
 
 of a man eating his Thanksgiving dinner alone give one 
 the same shock ? Perhaps one who is not a New Eng- 
 lander or a Puritan underrates the intensity of New 
 England and Puritan feeling. But Mrs. Beecher Stowe 
 is a New Englander, and she shows us in her Poganuc 
 how, when the burst of anti- Anglican feeling connected 
 with the Revolution was over, Christmas, with its little 
 Church pageantries and its genial memories, stole back to 
 its place in the hearts of all but the most austerely Puri- 
 tanical portion of the people. The children even of the 
 Puritan minister cannot keep away. One thing is certain. 
 Thanksgiving can never, like Christmas, be a feast of 
 mankind or of Christendom, since the time of harvest will 
 always differ in different parts of the world. Christmas, it 
 is true, we are apt to associate with winter, with snow, 
 and with the storms which raging out-of-doors endear by 
 contrast the bright fire and the happy circle within. But 
 it may be kept, and is kept, at once in England, in 
 America, in Australia, and in Hindostan. If the support- 
 ers of Thanksgiving Day fling any stones at Christinas 
 on account of its association with a sacred season of the 
 heathen, the stones may be flung back ; for nothing is 
 more certain than that the heathen were in the habit of 
 offering the first fruits to their gods. 
 
 Let me say, however, that there have been two occa- 
 sions on which I have myself been made to feel as 
 warmly as any New Englander about Thanksgiving. Both 
 were in the time of the Civil War. Just when the fury 
 of the war was at its height, and the North was intensely 
 
10 
 
 KEEPING CHRISTMAS. 
 
 embittered by the reports of the cruel treatment of its 
 captive soldiers at Andersonville, I visited the Prison 
 Hospital at Baltimore, in which a number of Confederate 
 prisoners, convalescent as well as sick, were confined. 
 It happened to be Thanksgiving Day, and looking into the 
 dining hall I saw the tables plentifully laid out with tur- 
 key and all the other good things of the season, which 
 had been sent in by the kind-hearted enemies of the pris- 
 oners. The incident was the more striking because 
 nowhere was the rage of parties so fierce as in the border 
 city of Baltimore. The other occasion was a Thanksgiv- 
 ing dinner party in New England when, though the quarrel 
 with England about the Alabama was going on, and our 
 host was a fervent patriot, and had lost relatives in the 
 war, he gave us a toast after dinner, " The President of 
 the United States and the Queen of England." 
 
 The custom of giving presents at Christmas and 
 the New Year certainly cannot be acquitted of heathen 
 associations : it is too clear that etrennes is derived from 
 strence. An ancient ecclesiastical writer consequently 
 denounces the custom as ** diabolical," the religion of 
 the heathen and everything pertaining to it being sup- 
 posed to be the direct work of the Devil. The youthful 
 recipients of the strence will be inclined to retort the male- 
 diction. In ancient times, as in modern, the gifts were 
 accompanied with good wishes for the coming year. The 
 practice is too natural to call for any learned explana- 
 tion. With us it has been developed into a round of 
 visits on New Year's Day, of the formality of which 
 
KEEPING CHRISTMAS. 
 
 It 
 
 society seems to be growing a little weary, so that the 
 custom is likely to fall into disuse. We shall have 
 reason to be sorry for its departure if it has served, 
 as I have heard people say that it has, to terminate, 
 without the awkwardness of a formal reconciliation, any 
 misunderstanding or coolness that may have arisen dur- 
 ing the past year. The end of the old year coming with 
 the birthday of the religion of charity is a good time for 
 writing off from the ledger of the memory all the evil 
 debts of unkindness and opening a new book of mutual 
 goodwill. 
 
 Nowhere is the spirit of Christmas, as it now is, of 
 Christmas as a feast of goodwill and affection, apart from 
 anything ecclesiastical, better embodied than in Dickens' 
 Christmas Carol. Though on a small scale, the Christmas 
 Carol is perhaps the most perfect work of Dickens' 
 genius. To say that it ought to be read in churches would 
 be profane ; but much is read in churches that is not so 
 good and certainly far less effective. By the social geni- 
 ality of his writings, the author of the Christmas Carol 
 and the creator of such characters as the "Brothers Cheery- 
 ble " has done more than sermons and dissertations to save 
 the heart of soci(ity from being poisoned by social regen- 
 erators who philanthropically preach class hatred, and 
 all the purveyors of malignity with whose venom the 
 world abounds ; and while we laugh or cry over his novels, 
 we hardly recognize the debt which we owe him on this 
 account. The description in " Pickwick " of the keeping 
 of Christmas Day at Mr. Wardle's, though full of fun, is 
 
 
12 
 
 KEEPING CHRISTMAS. 
 
 not in quite so wholesome a strain as the Carol. There is 
 too much whiskey in it ; as indeed there is generally in 
 the writings of Dickens, who was in a perpetual state of 
 revolt against the rule of the hypocritical fanaticism 
 which he has pilloried in Stiggers, and sometimes gives 
 his enemy the advantage by running into excess. We 
 may feast and be merry without excess. Christ himself 
 opens His mission and performs His first miracle at a 
 marriage feast. Great changes appear to be impending, 
 and the day may come, as the Comtists think, when 
 man will be so refined and intellectual that he will regard 
 taking food as an ignominious necessity of his material 
 nature, and will retire to eat in secret. But so long as 
 the glow of physical enjoyment retains its connection 
 with the glow of feeling, the least sensual of all phy- 
 sical delights will be our Christmas dinner, and the 
 Prohibitionist must be stern indeed who will forbid us to 
 drink the health of all friends, present or abroad, on 
 Christmas Day. 
 
 GoLDwiN Smith.