lves more than that. We do not
say of Love that he is short-sighted. We do not say of Love that he
is myopic. We do not say of Love that he is astigmatic. We say quite
simply, Love is blind. We might go further and say, Love is deaf. That
would be a profound and obvious truth. We might go further still and
say, Love is dumb. But that would be a profound and obvious lie. For
love is always an extraordinarily fluent talker. Love is a wind-bag,
filled with a gusty wind from Heaven.

It is always about the thing that we love most that we talk most.
About this thing, therefore, our errors are something more than our
deepest errors: they are our most frequent errors. That is why for
nearly two thousand years mankind has been more glaringly wrong on the
subject of Christmas than on any other subject. If mankind had hated
Christmas, he would have understood it from the first. What would
have happened then, it is impossible to say. For that which is hated,
and therefore is persecuted, and therefore grows brave, lives on
for ever, whilst that which is understood dies in the moment of our
understanding of it--dies, as it were, in our awful grasp. Between
the horns of this eternal dilemma shivers all the mystery of the jolly
visible world, and of that still jollier world which is invisible.
And it is because Mr. Shaw and the writers of his school cannot, with
all their splendid sincerity and, acumen, perceive that he and they
and all of us are impaled on those horns as certainly as the sausages
I ate for breakfast this morning had been impaled on the cook's
toasting-fork--it is for this reason, I say, that Mr. Shaw and his
friends seem to me to miss the basic principle that lies at the root
of all things human and divine. By the way, not all things that are
divine are human. But all things that are human are divine. But to
return to Christmas.

I select at random two of the more obvious fallacies that obtain. One
is that Christmas should be observed as a time of jubilation. This is
(I admit) quite a recent idea. It never entered into the tousled heads
of the shepherds by night, when the light of the angel of the Lord
shone about them and they arose and went to do homage to the Child. It
never entered into the heads of the Three Wise Men. They did not bring
their gifts as a joke, but as an awful oblation. It never entered into
the heads of the saints and scholars, the poets and painters, of the
Middle Ages. Looking back across the