JOHN'S REVIVAL
The New England country boy of the last generation never heard of Christmas.
There was no such day in his calendar. If John ever came across it in his reading, he attached no meaning to the word.
If his curiosity had been aroused, and he had asked his elders about it, he might have got the dim impression that it was a kind of Popish holiday, the celebration of which was about as wicked as "card-playing," or being a "democrat." John knew a couple of desperately bad boys who were reported to play "seven-up" in a barn, on the hay-mow, and the enormity of this practice made him shudder. He had once seen a pack of greasy "playing-cards," and it seemed to him to contain the quintessence of sin. If he had desired to defy all Divine law and outrage all human society, he felt that he could do it by shuffling them. And he was quite right. The two bad boys enjoyed in stealth their scandalous pastime, because they knew it was the most wicked thing they could do. If it had been as sinless as playing marbles, they wouldn't have cared for it. John sometimes drove past a brown, tumble-down farm-house, whose shiftless inhabitants, it was said, were card-playing people; and it is impossible to describe how wicked that house appeared to John. He almost expected to see its shingles stand on end. In the old New England, one could not in any other way so express his contempt of all holy and orderly life as by playing cards for amusement.
There was no element of Christmas in John's life, any more than there was of Easter, and probably nobody about him could have explained Easter; and he escaped all the demoralization attending Christmas gifts. Indeed, he never had any presents of any kind, either on his birthday or any other day. He expected nothing that he did not earn, or make in the way of "trade" with another boy. He was taught to work for what he received. He even earned, as I said, the extra holidays of the day after the "Fourth" and the day after Thanksgiving. Of the free grace and gifts of Christmas he had no conception. The single and melancholy association he had with it was the quaking hymn which his grandfather used to sing in a cracked and quavering voice,—
"While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground."
The "glory" that "shone around" at the end of it—the doleful voice always repeating, "and glory shone around"—made John as miserable as "Hark! from the tombs." It was all one dreary expectation of something uncomfortable. It was, in short, "religion." You'd got to have it some time; that John believed. But it lay in his unthinking mind to put off the "Hark! from the tombs" enjoyment as long as possible. He experienced a kind of delightful wickedness in indulging his dislike of hymns and of Sunday.
