Dec. 24.
It would be easy to make merry at the expense of those good people who send unsuitable presents and banal Christmas cards to their friends at this season of the year. It is a habit acquired by young people of a certain age and persists through life until the time of the sore and yellow leaf when it is more honoured in the breach than in the observance. I¢ has its drawbacks, chief of which is, perhaps, the necessity for those who no longer have the keen sense of the picturesque that belongs to youth, to think of something suitable to give to those who imperious custom—demands should be remembered on a certain day in December, Many harassed business man finds th task more formidable than calculating his New Year settl2- ment, To sce him peregrinating the gifts department of a store, which is piled to the roof with things he does not want, is amusing, though the equally harassed shop assistant fails to see the comic side of the incident. But the discipline may be good for the man of bates and ledgers and he receives a pleasure as welcome as it is expected when a lucky hit pro-joyous shouts from a ighted recipient.
Like most of our good customs the observance of Yuletide carries us back to the times of the grey forefathers of our race. The very origin of the word is Jost in antiquity, Tt has its roots in the old Saxon or Scandinavian tongue. The earliest history of its observance shows us the Vikings celebrating the festival, with wassail and skald to the North men, around their blazing log fires, It may be that the discovery of the use of fire sug: gested celebrating, the end of the short days of the dying year and the return of the sun with Three times he gives the ples commandment to "Revoice" und surely it needed something better then cold philosophy to make people joyful in those circumstances.
But Christianity has by no means a monopoly of the spirit of kindness and goodwill. The Mohammedan swears "in the name of God the Compassionate." Surely there is no better name for the Deity than this. To Believe in a great first cause something, but to believe that the Supreme Being, in whose hands are the issues of life and death, is compassionate is to have 'a faith that will light the darkest days that man may be called to pass through. The founder of Buddhism, too, is revered by the millions of Asi not becaitse of the height and depth of his teaching, though his very title means "the enlightened one," but because he. sought and proclaimed that found a balm for the sorrows of humanity, In China the worship of Buddha is overshadowed by that of Kwanyin, the goddess of mercy. Her worshippers hail her as "ta tze pei"—great in compassion and sympathy, Our gloomy Dean tells us that religion has fallen on evil days, but so long as mankind retains its char acton ud so long as the world ix a vale of tears, these attributes will appeal to the hearts of men. The devout believe that God made man in His own image and the cynic replies that man made the gods in his image. If the latter statement is the true one, then it speaks well for man that the things he deifies, the attributes he sets on high and bows down before in adoration, are the most admirable that his mind can conceive. An illiterate Chinese quoted in our hearing the proverb, "One character is worth a thousand picees of gold." Seeing that we were interested he proceeded: "Not every char-1 is worth so much but one character is, It is hao,' good. To be good and to do good li worth a thousand pieces of gold." Probubly the character he referred to was the only one in his language he could recognize when he saw it written, but surely he had learned from that one the philosophy of life. the cheerful blaze of the new clement. At any rate Yuletide is observed with a plethora of Night and warmth the wide world over. Joy, too, enters into the festivities for they bid farewell to the darkness of winter and welcome the returning strength of the lord of day who gives Tight and warmth to the world he rules over.
Tt was a happy inspiration that led the early Christians to seize on this solar cycle to celebrate the birth of the founder of their faith. Christianity is a religion of kindness. Its sacred book is full of admonitions to practise the grace of charity. The only saying of the Messiah found outside the four gospels is the short and pithy saying, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." And 60 Christmas is pre-eminently the season for giving gifts, forgetting old grudges and cementing treasured—_ friendships. Critics of religion object to its observance on the ground thut its services are melancholy. Yet in its very dark and struggling carly days we find the great apostle to the Gentiles writing from his prison in Rome to the church in the city of Philippi in which he had been @r= with rods and imprison-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.