l longings in her.
Nearly always there is the spirit of reverence, of bowing down before the
Infant God, a visitor from the supernatural world, though bone of man's
bone, flesh of his flesh. Heaven and earth have met together; the rough
stable is become the palace of the Great King.

This we might well call the "Catholic" Christmas, the Christmas of the
age when the Church most nearly answered to the needs of the whole man,
spiritual and sensuous. The Reformation in England and Germany did not
totally destroy it; in England the carol-singers kept up for a while the
old spirit; in Lutheran Germany a highly coloured and surprisingly
sensuous celebration of the Nativity lingered on into the eighteenth
century. In the countries that remained Roman Catholic much of the old
Christmas continued, though the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, faced
by the challenge of Protestantism, made for greater "respectability," and
often robbed the Catholic Christmas of its humour, its homeliness, its
truly popular stamp, substituting pretentiousness for simplicity, sugary
sentiment for naive and genuine poetry.

Apart from the transformation of the Church's Christmas from something
austere and metaphysical into something joyous and human, warm and
kindly, we shall note in our Second Part the survival of much that is
purely pagan, continuing alongside of the celebration of the Nativity,
and often little touched by its influence. But first we must consider the
side of the festival suggested by the English and French names:
_Christmas_ will stand for the liturgical rites commemorating the wonder
of the Incarnation--God in man made manifest--_Noel_ or "the Birthday,"
for the ways in which men have striven to realize the human aspect of the
great Coming.

How can we reach the inner meaning of the Nativity feast, its
significance for the faithful? Better, perhaps, by the way of |28|
poetry than by the way of ritual, for it is poetry that reveals the
emotions at the back of the outward observances, and we shall understand
these better when the singers of Christmas have laid bare to us their
hearts. We may therefore first give attention to the Christmas poetry of
sundry ages and peoples, and then go on to consider the liturgical and
popular ritual in which the Church has striven to express her joy at the
Redeemer's birth. Ceremonial, of course, has always mimetic tendencies,
and in a further chapter we shall see how these issued in genuine dram