od--the brotherhood of saint and
fool and criminal and ordinary man--as Tolstoi and Dostoevsky have
done in some of their work. But he dramatised goodwill with a
thoroughness never attempted before in England.

On the whole, it may be doubted whether the Christmas spirit has not
grown stronger and deeper since the time of Dickens. Only a few years
ago it seemed as though it were dying. People began to detest even
Christmas cards as something more Victorian than _The Idylls of the
King_. But here the old enthusiasm is back again, and we can no more
kill Christmas than the lion could kill Androcles. Perhaps the
popularisation of Italian art, as well as Dickens, has something to do
with it. Our imaginations cannot escape from the Virgin and the Child,
and we are like children ourselves in the inquisitiveness with which
we peer into that magic stable where the ass and the cow worship and
the shepherds and the kings and the little angels in their nightgowns
are on their knees. There has come back a gaiety, a playfulness, into
the picture, such as our grandfathers might have thought irreverent,
but their grandfathers' grandfathers, on the other hand, would have
seen to be perfectly natural. The cult of the child has, perhaps, been
overdone in recent years, and we have brought our mawkishness and our
morbid analysis even to the side of the cradle. At the same time, no
one has yet been able to point out a way by which we can escape from
the obsession of rates and taxes, of profit and loss, except by the
recovery of the child's vision. Without that vision religion itself
becomes a matter of profit and loss. With that vision the dullest
world blossoms with flowers; even truisms cease to be meaningless; and
Christmas is itself again. Out of the drowning of the world we have
made a toy for the nursery, and the birth of the King of Glory has
become the theme of a song for infants.

One of the most exquisite pictures in literature is that of the three
ships that come sailing into Bethlehem "on Christmas Day, in the
morning"; and not less childishly beautiful is that other short carol:

There comes a ship far sailing then,
Saint Michael was the steersman,
Saint John sat in the horn;
Our Lord harped, our Lady sang,
And all the bells of Heaven they rang,
On Christ's Sunday at morn.

One sees the same childish imagination at work in the old English
carol, "Hail, comely and clean," in which the three shepherds co