outward and visible is a sign and shadow of the inward and spiritual. It
means the seeing of common, earthly things shot through by the glory of
the Infinite. "Its note," as has been said of a stage of the mystic
consciousness, the Illuminative Way, "is sacramental not ascetic. It
entails ... the discovery of the Perfect One ablaze in the Many, not the
forsaking of the Many in order to find the One ... an ineffable radiance,
a beauty and a reality never before suspected, are perceived by a sort of
clairvoyance shining in the meanest things."{1} Christmas is the
festival of the Divine Immanence, and it is natural that it should have
been beloved by the saint and mystic whose life was the supreme
manifestation of the _Via Illuminativa_, Francis of Assisi.

Christmas is the most human and lovable of the Church's feasts. Easter
and Ascensiontide speak of the rising and exaltation of a glorious being,
clothed in a spiritual body refined beyond all comparison with our
natural flesh; Whitsuntide tells of the coming of a mysterious,
intangible Power--like the wind, we cannot tell whence It cometh and
whither It goeth; Trinity offers for contemplation an ineffable paradox
of Pure Being. But the God of Christmas is no ethereal form, no mere
spiritual essence, but a very human child, feeling the cold and the
roughness of the straw, needing to be warmed and fed and cherished.
Christmas is the festival of the natural body, of this world; it means
the consecration of the ordinary things of life, affection and
comradeship, eating and drinking and merrymaking; and in some degree the
memory of the Incarnation has been able to blend with the pagan joyance
of the New Year.

|158| |159|

Part II--Pagan Survivals

|160| |161|

CHAPTER VI

PRE-CHRISTIAN WINTER FESTIVALS

The Church and Superstition--Nature of Pagan Survivals--Racial
Origins--Roman Festivals of the _Saturnalia_ and Kalends--Was there a
Teutonic Midwinter Festival?--The Teutonic, Celtic, and Slav New
Year--Customs attracted to Christmas or January 1--The Winter Cycle
of Festivals--_Rationale_ of Festival Ritual: (_a_) Sacrifice and
Sacrament, (_b_) the Cult of the Dead, (_c_) Omens and Charms for the
New Year--Compromise in the Later Middle Ages--The Puritans and
Christmas--Decay of Old Traditions.

[Illustration:

NEW YEAR MUMMERS IN MANCHURIA.

An Asiatic example of animal masks.]

We have now to leave the comm