tmas 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