The Feast of St. Friend | Page 3

the past to their elders. If they now feel and exhibit
faith and enthusiasm in the practice of the festival, be sure that, at one
time, adults felt and exhibited the same faith and enthusiasm--yea, and
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.
* * * * *
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 naïveté, the charm of their old-world
simplicity, not as artistic renderings of fact.
* * * * *
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."
* * * * *
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!"
* * * * *
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