The Feast of St. Friend | Page 3

more! For in neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a convinced adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as the modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament.
Another and a crowning proof that Christmas has been diminished in our hearts lies in the fiery lyrical splendour of the old Christmas hymns. Those hymns were not written by people who made-believe at Christmas for the pleasure of youngsters. They were written by devotees. And this age could not have produced them.
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No! The decay of the old Christmas spirit among adults is undeniable, and its cause is fairly plain. It is due to the labours of a set of idealists--men who cared not for money, nor for glory, nor for anything except their ideal. Their ideal was to find out the truth concerning nature and concerning human history; and they sacrificed all--they sacrificed the peace of mind of whole generations--to the pleasure of slaking their ardour for truth. For them the most important thing in the world was the satisfaction of their curiosity. They would leave naught alone; and they scorned consequences. Useless to cry to them: "That is holy. Touch it not!" I mean the great philosophers and men of science--especially the geologists--of the nineteenth century. I mean such utterly pure-minded men as Lyell, Spencer, Darwin and Huxley. They inaugurated the mighty age of doubt and scepticism. They made it impossible to believe all manner of things which before them none had questioned. The movement spread until uneasiness was everywhere in the realm of thought, and people walked about therein fearsomely, as in a land subject to earthquakes. It was as if people had said: "We don't know what will topple next. Let's raze everything to the ground, and then we shall feel safer." And there came a moment after which nobody could ever look at a picture of the Nativity in the old way. Pictures of the Nativity were admired perhaps as much as ever, but for the exquisite beauty of their na?veté, the charm of their old-world simplicity, not as artistic renderings of fact.
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An age of scepticism has its faults, like any other age, though certain persons have pretended the contrary. Having been compelled to abandon its belief in various statements of alleged fact, it lumps principles and ideals with alleged facts, and hastily decides not to believe in anything at all. It gives up faith, it despises faith, in spite of the warning of its greatest philosophers, including Herbert Spencer, that faith of some sort is necessary to a satisfactory existence in a universe full of problems which science admits it can never solve. None were humbler than the foremost scientists about the narrowness of the field of knowledge, as compared with the immeasurability of the field of faith. But the warning has been ignored, as warnings nearly always are. Faith is at a discount. And the qualities which go with faith are at a discount; such as enthusiasm, spontaneity, ebullition, lyricism, and self-expression in general. Sentimentality is held in such horror that people are afraid even of sentiment. Their secret cry is: "Give us something in which we can believe."
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They forget, in their confusion, that the great principles, spiritual and moral, remain absolutely intact. They forget that, after all the shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind has still to live with dignity amid hostile nature, and in the presence of an unknowable power and that mankind can only succeed in this tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of that mutual goodwill which is based in sincerity and charity. They forget that, while facts are nothing, these principles are everything. And so, at that epoch of the year which nature herself has ordained for the formal recognition of the situation of mankind in the universe and of its resulting duties to itself and to the Unknown--at that epoch, they bewail, sadly or impatiently or cynically: "Oh! The bottom has been knocked out of Christmas!"
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But the bottom has not been knocked out of Christmas. And people know it. Somewhere, in the most central and mysterious fastness of their hearts, they know it. If they were not, in spite of themselves, convinced of it, why should they be so pathetically anxious to keep alive in themselves, and to foster in their children, the Christmas spirit? Obviously, a profound instinct is for ever reminding them that, without the Christmas spirit, they are lost. The forms of faith change, but the spirit of faith, which is the Christmas spirit, is immortal amid its endless vicissitudes. At a crisis of change, faith is weakened for the