Thus let our children keep the feast in their own way. Let good things be portioned out to them. Let bounties be carried to the dwellings of our poor. Let light and joy be in your homes at Christmas-time. And do not criticize too sharply, when in this festive joy something mingles that bears no close investigation; or when a note resounds, which less pure, at least is not borrowed from the motive of Bethlehem.

All this does no harm, and does not spoil our circles, provided God’s more deeply initiated children, the whiles little ones jubilate so loudly, understand jubilation in the depth of the soul; allow the glow of infinite love to operate in their inmost self; and know how to experience all the blessedness of the Christmas-mystery in their heart.

Thus spiritually to keep Christmas can not be the part of many; for only by deeper insight are you enabled so to do; and only after riper experience you obtain spiritual capacity for this.

But when you know deeper ways, and have not lost yourself in false mysticism, the wondrous narratives, of all the rich revelations, that come to us from Nazareth and Bethlehem, must every time be more deeply understood, be more fully admitted in you, and ever richer comfortings must flow therefrom for your own heart. A comforting, which of itself in turn generates fruit. A disposition of your inner life, which is bound to utter praise, and can not refrain from loving.

And though there are but few who know this deeper life, yet it is they who are the salt, that can avert corruption from our Christmas.

In your more busy ways of feasting the Martha is in evidence; in that more quiet spiritual celebration the image of Mary looms up before you; and only where both these together enrich our Christmas, the keeping of this feast of jubilation lives on as a power in the Church.

The antithesis, in which in our times the course of the world places itself to keep Christmas, is very noteworthy.

A century and more ago this antithesis was an altogether different one. The wild cry, that went forth everywhere was the cry for freedom. Liberation from every band was demanded. No more attendance at church. No Word of God to bind you. No God before Whom one should kneel. No Christ Whom one should worship. And reports have been abroad, that on Christmas day sermons were preached on the best method of feeding cattle in the stable.

But now, at the close of the nineteenth century, it is altogether different. It is no longer the cry for freedom, for one is as free as a bird in the air or as a fish in the sea; but now the wild cry is abroad to make the rich poorer and to make the poor more rich.

Liberty stands higher, for liberty is a spiritual good, and therefore the struggle of a century ago, though the inspiration of the Evil One mingled itself with it, was ever yet ideal in its starting-point. But now that ideal is lost. The temples of Mammon, with the Rothschilds as high priests, have not been erected for nought in all the capital cities of Europe. The whole tone of life has become materialistic, and as a result of this, one sings along with the other in this materialistic tone.

Even political rights are scoffed at, and are merely used as means, to chase after a material portion.

On the glowing field of gold and silver the battle is now fought to the end.

Thus the evil spirit of our time faces Christmas altogether differently from the demon of the French Revolution and the Rationalism all dominant at the time.

In 1789 the Cross would with malicious anger have been trampled under foot, at the end of the nineteenth century Satan appears with an “It is written” on his lips, and appeals to Scripture and pleads for the Christ, and presents himself, as though he actually aimed to continue, what once the Babe in Bethlehem began.

Even that Babe of Bethlehem still arrests the common attention. Not “because there is brought unto us the glad tidings of great joy, that there is born the Savior of the world, Who shall save us from our sins.” No, but because that Babe was poor, utterly poor, born in a stable; and put down not in a royal luxurious cradle, but in a manger of ox or ass.

Mary, too, a poor woman, Joseph a man of the lower class.

And then that brilliant scene, when those rich men came, to offer their Eastern treasures of gold and precious stones and fragrant herbs to that poor little Child, and that poor family; forsooth, it is bound to appeal to the heart of our times.

For behold, the materialistic spirit, that is abroad, would have it just so: Whoever has gold or silver, should of his own accord lay it at the feet of the poor.

And is there nothing in this seeming parallelism, that addresses itself to you?

Of course, all such comparisons are false through and through.

Christ, Who was rich and made Himself poor, can never be misused as the ideal of him, who is poor and wants to become rich.

This is mutually antagonistic.

But … . . there lies in the manger of Bethlehem also this other thought: that He Who was rich, became poor, that you might become rich.

And though this is intended spiritually, it is nevertheless clothed in a form that is borrowed from the material life, so that that crib declares unto you, that he who is rich, and is able to look complacently upon the poverty of others, without the impulse astir in him to lessen that poverty, and wherever possible, to remove it, can not with a quiet conscience kneel at that manger of Bethlehem.

A Christmas-tree in a rich family, laden with all sorts of beautiful presents for those who already know not what to do with their abundance of gifts, is a parody.

He who at Christmas time feels the urge to do good, because he is rich, should make that urge of his love go out to the poor; or by his very generosity the crib of Bethlehem is mocked.

And when our christian society asks itself, whether after a struggle of eighteen centuries, under her inspiration and glittering luxuries a condition has been born, which with respect to the mutual relation of rich and poor, typifies what in Bethlehem’s crib was revealed … . . alas, is there then no cause for Rachel again to lift up her lamentation and the voice of her weeping, and does it not behoove us with shamefacedness to confess before God, that the need, which on every side calls for help, and the misery, which makes its lamentations heard, and the lack, that cries, mingle bitter dissonances in our Christmas jubilation.

No, we do not interpret materially, what in Bethlehem was intended spiritually, but does that allow you to ignore the relation established by God between the material and the spiritual?

Did not the Christ, Who preached His sermon on the mount, perform the miracles of His compassionateness, even feeding the multitudes? Has not that same Christ instituted in His Church alongside the office of the preacher, also the office of benevolence? And where we grant, that too great wealth renders the spirit dull before God, is it not equally true, that too great misery, when hunger gnaws in the stomach, renders one deaf to the hunger of the soul?

It is true, you can not equalize conditions in this evil world. That can not be done and never will be done. But though to the end of time there will be rich and poor, can it ever be God’s ordinance, that some are so over-rich and others so bitterly, bitterly poor?

And when you say, that in Israel, too, (think of the rich man and Lazarus) such crying antitheses prevailed; you should never forget, what awful judgment in that very parable Jesus pronounced upon that rich man, who allowed Lazarus to starve.

And yet, however strongly we may cause this string also to vibrate at Christmas-time, this note must not falsify our Christmas celebration.

The riches, of which Christmas sings, are not material, but spiritual, and do not glisten in decorations and dainties, but in what brings balsam for the wounds of your soul.

And this depends solely, on what in your eye constitutes real happiness and highest merit. Is it the garment, that you hang about your shoulders, the house in which you dwell, the splendor of your banquet, or the gold that rings in your purse; then let the curtain drop before the manger of Bethlehem, for in behalf of these that Babe provides you nothing.

But if you say: No, not my house and not my garment; not my gold, and even not my body; but the hidden man that dwells in me; my spiritual being, the soul that dwells in my body, with all the spiritual wealth and the whole spirtual world, and the powers of eternity that belong to it, that is man’s highest good, his real honor, and his true riches; then lift the curtain, which the world has dropped before Bethlehem’s manger, and drink in life, drink in joys of soul from what by means of that manger of Bethlehem that Babe brings you to possess, and from what that angelic choir, that sings of peace on earth, makes you see and overhear.

Then keep not silent, but lift your voice in the streets, and in the name of that glorious God-Child proclaim it far and wide, that the evil demon of our age misleads poor mankind, and causes it to impoverish and to petrify, and that it assaults and violates the human worth, which God still spared to glisten in our generation.

Protest then with all the power and all the talent, wherewith God has entrusted you, against that evil tendency of spirits, which only asks, how mortal man can enjoy himself here for sixty, seventy years, and feels no concern about the nameless suffering and the awful horror, that age upon age, and to eternity, shall rest upon a race, that has dared to cast out its God and disdainfully to reject the gold of heaven.

Feel then your calling deeply, and come up to the high level of the same; of placing ever and again over against the matter-deification of our age, and its sole reckoning with man’s body and with the gold of earth, the holy language of the manger of Bethlehem, as a witness unto it.

And that this word of yours, hollow of sound, might not go in one ear to go out at the other, but might enter into hearts, arrest souls, and prove itself a power in the conscience, live yourself by Bethlehem and not by Mammon, in your own heart, in your own home, and in the settings wherein God has placed you.

What would it have cost the Almighty, so to have overwhelmed every one without distinction with material wealth that, satiated with life, every one of you would have sunk down exhausted by the side of your treasures.

But He, Who knoweth of what we are made, and Who knew, how under all that satiety of riches our inner, real man would impoverish, become unnerved and moribund, did not give gold to us all, but gave the Son of His love to the world.

And he who was permitted to lay hold on Christ, though he remained poor after the world, is not he far richer than the richest millionaire-king in America, because he is rich in his God?

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Footnotes

1. The Dutch keep two Christmas days; two at Easter, and two at Pentecost.—TRANSLATOR. ↩