“The clergy turned orthodox twenty-five years ago; the laity did not. The servants of the altar, having realized the melancholy effect of opposite tenets, resolutely fell back upon the ancient dogmas of Christianity; the congregations declined to follow suit. Hence the few ‘liberal’ clergymen remaining after the advent of the orthodox period had the consolation of knowing themselves to be in accord, if not with their clerical brethren, at least with the majority of the educated, and, perhaps, even the uneducated, classes.”

He proceeds to mention various cases of prominent Lutheran clergymen who denied the divinity of Christ, or other doctrines equally necessary to be maintained by men professing to be Christians, and of the unsuccessful attempts made to silence them. As the correspondent says “irreverent liberal opinion on the case is well reflected in an article in the Berlin Volks-Zeitung,” which is so instructive that we quote it for the especial benefit of Mr. Froude:

“As long as Protestant clergymen are appointed by provincial consistories officiating in behalf of the crown our congregations will have to put up with any candidates that may be forced upon them. They may, perhaps, be allowed to nominate their pastors, but they will be impotent to exact the confirmation of their choice from the ecclesiastical authorities. Nor do we experience any particular curiosity as to the result of the inquiry instituted against Herr Hossbach. In matters of this delicate nature judicious evasions have been too often resorted to by clever accused, and visibly favored by ordained judges of the faith, for us to care much for the result of the suit opened. A sort of fanciful and imaginative prevarication has always flourished in theological debate, and the old artifice, it is to be foreseen, will be employed with fresh versatility in the present instance. Should the election of Herr Hossbach be confirmed, the consistorial decree will be garnished with so many ‘ifs’ and ‘althoughs’ that the brilliant ray of truth will be dimmed by screening assumptions, like a candle placed behind a colored glass. Similarly, should the consistory decline to ratify the choice of the vestry, the refusal is sure to be rendered palatable by the employment of particularly mild and euphonious language. In either case the triumph of the victorious party will be but half a triumph.... It is not a little remarkable that the Protestant Church in this country should be kept under the control of superimposed authorities, while Roman Catholics and Jews are free to preach what they like. The power of the Catholic hierarchy has been broken by the new laws. Catholic clergymen deviating from the approved doctrine of the Church are protected by the Government from the persecution of their bishops. Catholic congregations are positively urged and instigated to profit by the privileges accorded them, and assert their independence against bishop and priest. Jewish rabbis, too, are free to disseminate any doctrine without being responsible for their teaching to spiritual or secular judges. Only Protestant congregations enjoy the doubtful advantage of having the election of their clergy controlled, and the candor of their clergy made the theme of penal inquiry.... And yet Protestant congregations have a ready means of escape at their disposal. Let them leave the church, and they are free to elect whomsoever they may choose as their minister. As it is, the indecision of the congregations maintains the status quo by forcing liberal clergymen into the dogmatic straight-waistcoat of the consistories.”

“In the above argument one important fact is overlooked,” says the Times’ correspondent.

“Among the liberals opposed to the consistories there are many atheists, but few sufficiently religious to care for reform. Hence the course taken by the consistories may be resented, but the preaching of the liberal clergy is not popular enough to create a new denomination or to compel innovation within the pale of the church. The fashionable metaphysical systems of Germany are pessimist.”

A week previous to the date of this letter the Lutheran pastors held their annual meeting at Berlin. The Rev. Dr. Grau, who is referred to as “a distinguished professor of theology,” speaking of the task of the clergy in modern times—certainly a most important subject for consideration—said:

“These are serious times for the church. The protection of the temporal power is no longer awarded to us to anything like the extent it formerly was. The great mass of the people is either indifferent or openly hostile to doctrinal teaching. Not a few listen to those striving to combine Christ with Belial, and to reconcile redeeming truth with modern science and culture. There are those who dream of a future church erected on the ruins of the Lutheran establishment, which by these enterprising neophytes is already regarded as dead and gone.”

“The meeting,” observes the correspondent, “by passing the resolutions proposed by Dr. Grau, endorsed the opinions of the principal speaker.” And he adds:

“While giving this unmitigated verdict upon the state of religion among the people, the meeting displayed open antagonism to the leading authorities of the church. To the orthodox pastors the sober and sedative policy pursued by the Ober Kirchen Rath is a dereliction even more offensive than the downright apostasy of the liberals. To render their opposition intelligible the change that has recently supervened in high quarters should be adverted to in a few words. Soon after his accession to the throne the reigning sovereign, in his capacity as summus episcopus, recommended a lenient treatment of liberal views. Though himself strictly orthodox, as he has repeatedly taken occasion to announce, the emperor is tolerant in religion, and too much of a statesman to overlook the undesirable consequences that must ensue from permanent warfare between church and people. He therefore appointed a few moderate liberals members of the supreme council, accorded an extensive degree of self-government to the synods, at the expense of his own episcopal prerogative, and finally sanctioned civil marriage and ‘civil baptism,’ as registration is sarcastically called in this country, to the intense astonishment and dismay of the orthodox. The last two measures, it is true, were aimed at the priests of the Roman Catholic Church, who were to be deprived of the power of punishing those of their flock siding with the state in the ecclesiastical war; but, as the operation of the law could not be restricted to one denomination, Protestants were made amenable to a measure which, to the orthodox among them, was quite as objectionable as to the believing adherents of the Pope. The supreme council of the Protestant Church, having to approve these several innovations adopted by the crown, gradually accustomed itself to regard compromise and bland pacification as one of the principal duties imposed upon it.”

The correspondent ends his letter thus:

“When all was over orthodoxy was at feud with the people as well as with the authoritative guardians of the church. Yet neither people nor guardians remonstrated. For opposite reasons both were equally convinced they could afford to ignore the charges made.”

So important was the letter that the London Times made it the subject of an editorial article, wherein it speaks of “the singular revival of theological and ecclesiastical controversy, which is observable in all directions,” having “at last reached the slumbering Protestantism of Prussia.” It confesses that

“The state of things as described by our correspondent is certainly a very anomalous one. The Prussian Protestant Church has, of late years at least, had but little hold on the respect and affections of the great majority of the people; they are at best but indifferent to it when they are not actively hostile. We are not concerned to investigate the causes of this lack of popularity; we are content to take it as a fact manifest to all who know the country and acknowledged by all observers alike.”

“German Protestantism was a power and an influence,” it says,

“To which the modern world is deeply indebted, and with which, now that ultramontanism is triumphant in the Church of Rome and priestcraft is again striving in all quarters to exert its sway, the friends of freedom and toleration can ill afford to dispense. There is no more ominous sign in the history of an established church than a divorce between intelligence and orthodoxy. This is what, to all appearances, has happened in Prussia.”

We could corroborate this by abundance of testimony from all quarters; but surely the evidence here given is sufficient to convince any man of the deplorable state of Protestantism in Prussia. Why Mr. Froude should have chosen that country of all others for his Protestant paradise we cannot conceive, unless on the ground that he is Mr. Froude. “The world on one side, and Popery on the other,” he says, “are dividing the practical control over life and conduct. North Germany, manful in word and deed, sustains the fight against both enemies and carries the old flag to victory. A few years ago another Thirty Years’ War was feared for Germany. A single campaign sufficed to bring Austria on her knees. Protestantism, as expressed in the leadership of Prussia, assumed the direction of the German Confederation” (pp. 135–136).

And whither does this leadership tend? To the devil, if the London Times, if Dr. Grau, if every observant man who has written or spoken on this subject, is to be believed. The only religion in Prussia to-day is the Catholic; Protestantism has yielded to atheism or nothingism. The persecution has only proved and tempered the Catholic Church; not even a strong and favoring government can infuse a faint breath of life into the dead carcase of Prussian Protestantism. It is much the same story all the world over. Mr. Froude sees clearly enough what is coming. Protestantism as a religious power is dead. It has lost all semblance of reality. It had no religious reality from the beginning. It will still continue to be used as an agent by political schemers and conspirators; but in the fight between religion and irreligion it is of little worth. The fight is not here, but where Mr. Froude rightly places it—between the irreligious world and Catholicity, which “are dividing the practical control over life and conduct.”

And thus heresies die out; they expire of their own corruption. Their very offspring rise up against them. Their children cry for bread and they give them a stone. The fragments of truth on which they first build are sooner or later crushed out by the great mass of falsehood. The few good seeds are choked up by the harvest of the bad, and only the ill weeds thrive, until all the space around them is desolate of fruit or light or sweetness, or anything fair under heaven. Then comes the husbandman in his own good time, and curses the barren fig-tree and clears the desolate waste. It will be with Protestantism as it has been with all the heresies; Christians will wonder, and the time would seem not to be very far distant when they will wonder that Protestantism ever should have been. It will go to its grave, the same wide grave that has swallowed up heresy after heresy. Gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, Protestantism, all the isms, are children of the same family, live the same life, die the same death. The everlasting church buries them all, and no man mourns their loss.

saith the old song. And now, as the festal season draws nigh, everybody seems bent on fulfilling the behest to the uttermost. The streets are gay with lights and laughter; the shops are all a-glitter with precious things; the markets are bursting with good cheer. The air vibrates with a babble of merry voices, until the very stars seem to catch the infection and twinkle a thought more brightly. The faces of those you meet beam with joyous expectation; huge baskets on their arms, loaded with good things for the morrow, jostle and thump you at every turn, but no one dreams of being ill-natured on Christmas Eve; mysterious bundles in each hand contain unimagined treasures for the little ones at home. And hark! do you not catch a jingle of distant sleigh-bells, a faint, far-off patter and scrunching of tiny hoofs upon the snow? It is the good St. Nicholas setting out upon his merry round; it is Dasher and Slasher and Prancer and Vixen scurrying like the wind over the house-tops. And high over all—“the poor man’s music”—the merry, merry bells of Yule, the solemn, the sacred bells, peal forth the tidings of great joy. Is it not hard to conceive that the time should have been when Christmas was not? impossible to conceive that any in a Christian land should have wished to do away with it—should have been willing, having had it, ever to forego a festival so fraught with all holy and happy memories?

Yet once such men were found, and but little more than two centuries ago. It was on the 24th day of December, 1652—day for ever to be marked with the blackest of black stones, nay, with a bowlder of Plutonian nigritude—that the British House of Commons, being moved thereto “by a terrible remonstrance against Christmas day grounded upon divine Scripture, wherein Christmas is called Antichrists masse, and those masse-mongers and Papists who observe it,” and after much time “spent in consultation about the abolition of Christmas day, passed order to that effect, and resolved to sit upon the following day, which was commonly called Christmas day.” Whether this latter resolution was carried into effect we do not know. If so, let us hope that their Christmas dinners disagreed with them horribly, and that the foul fiend Nightmare kept hideous vigil by every Parliamentary pillow.

But think of such an atrocious sentiment being heard at all in Westminster! How must the very echoes of the hall have shrunk from repeating that monstrous proposition—how shuddered and fled away into remotest corners and crevices as that

How must they have disbelieved their ears, and tossed the impious utterance back and forth from one to another in agonized questioning, growing feebler and fainter at each repulse, until their voices, faltering through doubt into dismay, grew dumb with horror! How must “Rufus’ Roaring Hall”^[107] have roared again outright with rage and grief over that strange, that unhallowed profanation! What wan phantoms of old-time mummeries and maskings, what dusty and crumbling memories of royal feast and junketing, must have hovered about the heads of those audacious innovators, shrieking at them what unsyllabled reproaches from voiceless lips, shaking at them what shadowy fingers of entreaty or menace! And if the proverb about ill words and burning ears be true, how those crop-ears must have tingled!

Within those very walls England’s kings for generations had kept their Christmas-tide most royally with revelry and dance and wassail. There Henry III. on New Year’s day, 1236, to celebrate the coronation of Eleanor, his queen, entertained 6,000 of his poorer subjects of all degrees; and there twelve years later, though he himself ate his plum-pudding at Winchester, he was graciously pleased to bid his treasurer “fill the king’s Great Hall from Christmas day to the Day of Circumcision with poor people and feast them.” There, too, at a later date Edward III. had for sauce to his Christmas turkey—not to mention all sorts of cates and confections, tarts and pasties of most cunning device, rare liquors and spiced wines—no less than two captive kings, to wit, David of Scotland and John of France. Poor captive kings! Their turkey—though no doubt their princely entertainer was careful to help them to the daintiest tidbits, and to see that they had plenty of stuffing and cranberry sauce—must have been but a tasteless morsel, and their sweetbreads bitter indeed. Another Scottish king, the first James, of tuneful and unhappy memory, had even worse (pot) luck soon after. Fate, and that hospitable penchant of our English cousins in the remoter centuries for quietly confiscating all stray Scotch princes who fell in their way, as though they had been contraband of war, gave him the enviable opportunity of eating no less than a score of Christmas dinners on English soil. But he seems to have been left to eat them alone or with his jailer in “bowery Windsor’s calm retreat” or the less cheerful solitude of the Tower. It does not appear that either the fourth or the fifth Henry, his enforced hosts, ever asked him to put his royal Scotch legs under their royal English mahogany. Had Richard II. been in the place of “the ingrate and cankered Bolingbroke,” we may be sure that his northern guest would not have been treated so shabbily. In his time Westminster and his two thousand French cooks (shades of Lucullus! what an appetite he must have had, and what a broiling and a baking and a basting must they have kept up among them; the proverb of “busier than an English oven at Christmas” had reason then, at least) were not long left idle; for it was their sovereign’s jovial custom to keep open house in the holidays for as many as ten thousand a day—a comfortable tableful. It was his motto plainly to

Such a device, however, the third Richard might have made his own with still greater reason. That ill-used prince, who was no doubt a much better fellow at bottom than it has pleased Master Shakspeare to represent him—if Richmond had not been Queen Bess’ grandpapa, we should like enough have had a different story and altogether less about humps and barking dogs—made the most of a limited opportunity to show what he could do in the way of holiday dinner-giving. The only two Christmases he had to spend as king at Westminster—for him but a royal stage on his way to a more permanent residence at Bosworth Field—he celebrated with extraordinary magnificence, as became a prince “reigning,” says Philip de Comines, “in greater splendor than any king of England for the last hundred years.” On the second and last Christmas of his reign and life the revelry was kept up till the Epiphany, when “the king himself, wearing his crown, held a splendid feast in the Great Hall similar to his coronation.” Wearing his crown, poor wretch! He seems to have felt that his time was short for wearing it, and that he must put it to use while he had it. Already, indeed, as he feasted, rapacious Fortune, swooping implacable, was clawing it with skinny, insatiable claws, estimating its value and the probable cost of altering it to fit another wearer, and thinking how much better it would look on the long head of her good friend Richmond, who had privately bespoken it. No doubt some cold shadow of that awful, unseen presence fell across the banquet-table and poisoned the royal porridge.

What need to tell over the long roll of Christmas jollities, whose memory from those historic walls might have pleaded with or rebuked the sour iconoclasts planning gloomily to put an end to all such for ever; how even close-fisted Henry VII.—no fear of his losing a crown, if gripping tight could keep it—feasted there the lord-mayor and aldermen of London on the ninth Christmas of his reign, sitting down himself, with his queen and court and the rest of the nobility and gentry, to one hundred and twenty dishes served by as many knights, while the mayor, who sat at a side-table, no doubt, had to his own share no fewer than twenty-four dishes, followed, it is to be feared, if he ate them all, by as many nightmares; how that meek and exemplary Christian monarch, Henry VIII., “welcomed the coming, sped the parting” wife at successive Christmas banquets of as much splendor as the spoils of something over a thousand monasteries could furnish forth;^[108] how good Queen Bess, who had her own private reading of the doctrine “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” sat in state there at this festival season to accept the offerings of her loyal lieges, high and low, gentle and simple, from prime minister to kitchen scullion, until she was able to add to the terrors of death by having to leave behind her something like three thousand dresses and some trunkfuls of jewels in Christmas gifts; or what gorgeous revels and masques—Inigo Jones (Inigo Marquis Would-be), Ben Jonson, and Master Henry Lawes (he of “the tuneful and well-measured song”) thereto conspiring—made the holidays joyous under James and Charles. Some ghostly savor of those bygone banquets might, one would think, have made even Praise-God Barebone’s mouth water, and melted his surly virtue into tolerance of other folks’ cakes and ale—what virtue, however ascetic, could resist the onslaught of two thousand French cooks? Some faint, far echo of all these vanished jollities should have won the ear, if not the heart, of the grimmest “saint” among them. Or if they were proof against the blandishments of the world’s people, if they fled from the abominations of Baal, could not their own George Wither move them to spare the cheery, harmless frivolities, the merry pranks of Yule? Jovially as any Cavalier, shamelessly as any Malignant of them all, he sings their praises in his

Or Master Milton, again, Latin secretary to the council, author of the famous Iconoclastes, shield (or, as some would have put it, official scold) of the Commonwealth, the scourge of prelacy and conqueror of Salmasius—he was orthodox surely; yet what of Arcades and Cornus? Master Milton, too, had written holiday masques, and, what is more, they had been acted; nay, he had even been known more than once, on no less authority than his worshipful nephew, Master Philips, “to make so bold with his body as to take a gaudy-day” with the gay sparks of Gray’s Inn. Alas! such carnal-minded effusions belonged to the unregenerate days of both these worthy brethren, when they still dwelt in the tents of the ungodly, before they had girded on the sword of Gideon and gone forth to smite the Amalekite hip and thigh. Vainly might the menaced festival look for aid in that direction. So far from saying a word in its favor, they would now have been fiercest in condemnation, if only to cover their early backsliding; if only to avert any suspicion that they still hankered after the fleshpots. Poor Christmas was doomed.

So, by act of Parliament, “our joyful’st feast” was solemnly stricken out of the calendar, cashiered from its high pre-eminence among the holidays of the year, and degraded to the ranks of common days. All its quaint bravery of holly-berries and ivy-leaves was stripped from it, its jolly retinue of boars’ heads and wassail-bowls, of Yule-clogs and mistletoe-boughs, of maskers and mummers, of waits and carols, Lords of Misrule and Princes of Christmas, sent packing. Then began “the fiery persecution of poor mince-pie throughout the land; plum-porridge was denounced as mere popery, and roast-beef as anti-Christian.” ’Twas a fatal, a perfidious, a short-lived triumph. The nation, shocked in its most cherished traditions, repudiated the hideous doctrine; the British stomach, deprived of its holiday beef and pudding, so to speak, revolted. The reign of the righteous was speedily at an end. History, with her usual shallowness, ascribes to General Monk the chief part in the Restoration; it was really brought about by that short-sighted edict of the 24th of December, 1652. Charles or Cromwell, king or protector—what cared honest Hodge who ruled and robbed him? But to forego his Christmas porridge—that was a different matter; and Britons never should be slaves. So, just eight years after it had been banished, Christmas was brought back again with manifold rejoicing and bigger wassail-bowls and Yule-clogs than ever; and, as if to make honorable amends for its brief exile, the Lord of Misrule himself was crowned and seated on the throne, where, as we all know, to do justice to his office, if he never said a foolish thing he never did a wise one.

And from that time to this Christmas has remained a thoroughly British institution, as firmly entrenched in the national affections, as generally respected, and perhaps as widely appreciated as Magna Charta itself. Sit on Christmas day! A British Parliament now would as soon think of sitting on the Derby day. To how many of their constituents have the two festivals any widely differing significance perhaps it would be wise not to inquire too closely. Each is a holiday—that is, a day off work, a synonym for “a good time,” a little better dinner than usual, and considerably more beer. Like the children, “they reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond the cake and orange.” “La justice elle-même,” says Balzac, “se traduit aux yeux de la halle par le commissaire—personage avec lequel elle se familiarise.” His epigram the author of Ginx’s Baby may translate for us—English epigrams, like English plays, being for the most part matter of importation free of duty; e.g., that famous one in Lothair about the critic being a man who has failed in literature or art, another consignment from Balzac—when he makes Ginx’s theory of government epitomize itself as a policeman. So Ginx’s notion of Christmas, we suspect, is apt to be beef and beer and Boxing-night—with perhaps a little more beer.

Certainly the attachment of the British public to these features of the day—we are considering it for the moment in the light in which a majority of non-Catholics look upon it, apparently, as a merely social festival, and not at all in its religious aspect (though to a Catholic, of course, the two are as indistinguishably blended as the rose and the perfume of the rose)—has never been shaken. If one may judge from a large amount of the English fiction which at this season finds its way to the American market—and the novels of to-day, among a novel-reading people, are as straight and sure a guide to its heart as were ever its ballads in the time of old Fletcher of Saltoun—if one may judge from much of English Christmas literature, these incidents of the day are, if not the most important, certainly the most prominent and popular. What we may call the Beef and Beer aspect of the season these stories are never tired of glorifying and exalting. Dickens is the archpriest of this idolatry, which, indeed, he in a measure invented, or at least brought into vogue; and his Christmas Stories, as most of his stories, fairly reek with the odors of the kitchen and the tap-room. Material comfort, and that, too, usually of a rather coarse kind, is the universal theme, and even the charity they are supposed to inculcate can scarcely be called a moral impulse, so much as the instinct of a physical good-nature, well-fed and content with itself and the world—of a good-humored selfishness willing to make others comfortable, because thereby it puts away from itself the discomfort of seeing them otherwise. It is a kind of charity which, in another sense than that of Scripture, has to cover a multitude of sins.

One may say this of Dickens, without at all detracting from his many great qualities as a writer, that he has done more, perhaps, than any other writer to demoralize and coarsen the popular notion of what Christmas is and means; to make of his readers at best but good-humored pagans with lusty appetites for all manner of victuals and an open-handed readiness to share their good things with the first comer. These are no doubt admirable traits; but one gets a little tired of having them for ever set forth as the crown and completion of Christian excellence, the sum and substance of all that is noble and exalted in the sentiment of the season. Let us enjoy our Christmas dinner by all means; let the plum-pudding be properly boiled and the turkey done to a turn, and may we all have enough to spare a slice or two for a poorer neighbor! But must we therefore sit down and gobble turkey and pudding from morning till night? Should we hang up a sirloin and fall down and worship it? Is that all that Christmas means? Turn from the best of these books to this exquisite little picture of Christmas Eve in a Catholic land:

“Christmas is come—the beautiful festival, the one I love most, and which gives me the same joy as it gave the shepherds of Bethlehem. In real truth, one’s whole soul sings with joy at this beautiful coming of God upon earth—a coming which here is announced on all sides of us by music and by our charming nadalet^[110] Nothing at Paris can give you a notion of what Christmas is with us. You have not even the midnight Mass. We all of us went to it, papa at our head, on the most perfect night possible. Never was there a finer sky than ours was that midnight—so fine that papa kept perpetually throwing back the hood of his cloak, that he might look up at the sky. The ground was white with hoar-frost, but we were not cold; besides, the air, as we met it, was warmed by the bundles of blazing torchwood which our servants carried in front of us to light us on our way. It was delightful, I do assure you; and I should like you to have seen us there on our road to church, in those lanes with the bushes along their banks as white as if they were in flower. The hoar-frost makes the most lovely flowers. We saw a long spray so beautiful that we wanted to take it with us as a garland for the communion-table, but it melted in our hands; all flowers fade so soon! I was very sorry about my garland; it was mournful to see it drop away and get smaller and smaller every minute.”

It is Eugénie de Guérin who writes thus—that pure and delicate spirit so well fitted to feel and value all that is beautiful and touching in this most beautiful and touching service of the church. To come from the one reading to the other is like being lifted suddenly out of a narrow valley to the free air and boundless views of a mountain-top; like coming from the gaslight into the starlight; it is like hearing the song of the skylark after the twitter of the robin—a sound pleasant and cheery enough in itself, but not elevating, not inspiring, not in any way satisfying to that hunger after ideal excellence which is the true life of the spirit, and which strikes the true key-note of this festal time.

But Eugénie de Guérin is perhaps too habitual a dweller on those serene heights to furnish a fair comparison; let us take a homelier picture from a lower level. It is still in France; this time in Burgundy, as the other was in Languedoc:

“Every year, at the approach of Advent, people refresh their memories, clear their throats, and begin preluding, in the long evenings by the fireside, those carols whose invariable and eternal theme is the coming of the Messias. They take from old pamphlets little collections begrimed with dust and smoke, ... and as soon as the first Sunday of Advent sounds they gossip, they gad about, they sit together by the fireside, sometimes at one house, sometimes at another, taking turns in paying for the chestnuts and white wine, but singing with one common voice the praises of the Little Jesus. There are very few villages, even, which during all the evenings of Advent do not hear some of these curious canticles shouted in their streets to the nasal drone of bagpipes.

“More or less, until Christmas Eve, all goes on in this way among our devout singers, with the difference of some gallons of wine or some hundreds of chestnuts. But this famous eve once come, the scale is pitched upon a higher key; the closing evening must be a memorable one.... The supper finished, a circle gathers around the hearth, which is arranged and set in order this evening after a particular fashion, and which at a later hour of the night is to become the object of special interest to the children. On the burning brands an enormous log has been placed; ... it is called the Suche (the Yule-log). ‘Look you,’ say they to the children, ‘if you are good this evening Noel will rain down sugar-plums in the night.’ And the children sit demurely, keeping as quiet as their turbulent little natures will permit. The groups of older persons, not always as orderly as the children, seize this good opportunity to surrender themselves with merry hearts and boisterous voices to the chanted worship of the miraculous Noel. For this final solemnity they have kept the most powerful, the most enthusiastic, the most electrifying carols.

“This last evening the merry-making is prolonged. Instead of retiring at ten or eleven o’clock, as is generally done on all the preceding evenings, they wait for the stroke of midnight; this word sufficiently proclaims to what ceremony they are going to repair. For ten minutes or a quarter of an hour the bells have been calling the faithful with a triple-bob-major; and each one, furnished with a little taper streaked with various colors (the Christmas candle), goes through the crowded streets, where the lanterns are dancing like will-o’-the-wisps at the impatient summons of the multitudinous chimes. It is the midnight Mass.”

There you have fun, feasting, and frolic, as, indeed, there may fitly be to all innocent degrees of merriment, on the day which brought redemption to mankind. But there is also, behind and pervading all this rejoicing and harmless household gayety, the religious sentiment which elevates and inspires it, which chastens it from commonplace and grossness, which gives it a meaning and a soul. The English are fond of calling the French an irreligious people, because French literature, especially French fiction, from which they judge, takes its tone from Paris, which is to a great extent irreligious. But outside of the large cities, if a balance were struck on this point between the two countries, it would scarcely be in favor of England.

This, however, by way of episode and as a protest against this grovelling, material treatment of the most glorious festival of the Christian year. As we were about to say when interrupted, though Christmas regained its foothold as a national holiday at the Restoration, it came back sadly denuded of its following and shorn of most of its old-time attractions. So it fared in old England. In New England it can scarcely be said ever to have won a foothold at all, or at best no more than a foothold and a sullen toleration. Almost the first act of those excellent Pilgrim Fathers who did not land at Plymouth Rock was to anticipate by thirty years or so the action of their Parliamentary brethren at home in abolishing the sacred anniversary, which must, indeed, have been a tacit rebuke to the spirit of their creed. They landed on the 16th of December, and “on ye 25th day,” writes William Bradford, “began to erect ye first house for comone use to receive them and their goods.” And lest this might seem an exception made under stress, we find it recorded next year that “on ye day caled Christmas day ye Gov’r caled them out to worke.” So it is clear New England began with a calendar from which Christmas was expunged. In New England affections Thanksgiving day replaces it—an “institution” peculiarly acceptable, we must suppose, to the thrift which can thus wipe out its debt of gratitude to Heaven by giving one day for three hundred and sixty-four—liquidating its liabilities, so to speak, at the rate of about three mills in the dollar. In the Middle States and in the South the day has more of its time-old observance, but neither here nor elsewhere may we hope to encounter many of the quaint and cheery customs with which our fathers loved to honor it, and which made it for them the pivot of the year. Wither has told us something of these; let a later minstrel give us a fuller picture of what Merry Christmas was in days of yore:

Let Herrick supplement the picture with his

Does the picture please you? Would you fain be a guest at the baron’s table, or lend a hand with jovial Herrick to fetch in the mighty Yule-log? Are you longing for a cut of that boar’s head or a draught of the wassail, or curious to explore the contents of that mysterious “Christmas pye,” which seems to differ so much from all other pies that it has to be spelled with a y? Well, well, we must not repine. Fate, which has denied us these joys, has given us compensations. No doubt the baron, for all his Yule-logs, would sometimes have given his baronial head (when he happened to have a cold in it) for such a fire—let it be of sea-coal in a low grate and the curtains drawn—as the reader and his humble servant are this very minute toasting their toes at. Those huge open fireplaces are admirably effective in poetry, but not altogether satisfactory of a cold winter’s night, when half the heat goes up the chimney and all the winds of heaven are shrieking in through the chinks in your baronial hall and playing the very mischief with your baronial rheumatism. Or do we believe that boar’s head was such a mighty fascinating dish after all, or much, if anything, superior to the soused pig’s head with which good old Squire Bracebridge replaced it? No, every age to its own customs; we may be sure that each finds out what is best for it and for its people.

Yet one custom we do begrudge a little to the past, or rather to the other lands where it still lingers here and there in the present. That is the graceful and kindly custom of the waits. These were Christmas carols, as the reader no doubt knows, chanted by singers from house to house in the rural districts during the season of Advent. In France they were called noels, and in Longfellow’s translation of one of these we may see what they were like: