[Transcriber's Note: In this edition the numerals are enclosed in {curly brackets}, so they will not be confused with footnotes.]
[ [2] “Christianity,” as here used, will stand for the system of orthodoxy which had been fixed in its main outlines when the festival of Christmas took its rise. The relation of the orthodox creed to historical fact need not concern us here, nor need we for the purposes of this study attempt to distinguish between the Christianity of Jesus and ecclesiastical accretions around his teaching.
[ [3] Whether the Nativity had previously been celebrated at Rome on January 6 is a matter of controversy; the affirmative view was maintained by Usener in his monograph on Christmas,[{6}] the negative by Monsignor Duchesne.[{7}] A very minute, cautious, and balanced study of both arguments is to be found in Professor Kirsopp Lake's article on Christmas in Hastings's “Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics,”[{8}] and a short article was contributed by the same writer to The Guardian, December 29, 1911. Professor Lake, on the whole, inclines to Usener's view. The early history of the festival is also treated by Father Cyril Martindale in “The Catholic Encyclopædia” (article “Christmas”).
[ [4] Usener says 354, Duchesne 336.
[ [5] The eastern father, Epiphanius (fourth century), gives a strange account of a heathen, or perhaps in reality a Gnostic, rite held at Alexandria on the night of January 5-6. In the temple of Kore—the Maiden—he tells us, worshippers spent the night in singing and flute-playing, and at cock-crow brought up from a subterranean sanctuary a wooden image seated naked on a litter. It had the sign of the cross upon it in gold in five places—the forehead, the hands, and the knees. This image was carried seven times round the central hall of the temple with flute-playing, drumming, and hymns, and then taken back to the underground chamber. In explanation of these strange actions it was said: “To-day, at this hour, hath Kore (the Maiden) borne the Æon.”[{15}] Can there be a connection between this festival and the Eleusinian mysteries? In the latter there was a nocturnal celebration with many lights burning, and the cry went forth, “Holy Brimo (the Maiden) hath borne a sacred child, Brimos.”[{16}] The details given by Miss Harrison in her “Prolegomena” of the worship of the child Dionysus[{17}] are of extraordinary interest, and a minute comparison of this cult with that of the Christ Child might lead to remarkable results.
[ [6] Mithraism resembled Christianity in its monotheistic tendencies, its sacraments, its comparatively high morality, its doctrine of an Intercessor and Redeemer, and its vivid belief in a future life and judgment to come. Moreover Sunday was its holy-day dedicated to the Sun.
[ [7] This is the explanation adopted by most scholars (cf. Chambers, “M. S.,” i., 241-2). Duchesne suggests as an explanation of the choice of December 25 the fact that a tradition fixed the Passion of Christ on March 25. The same date, he thinks, would have been assigned to His Conception in order to make the years of His life complete, and the Birth would come naturally nine months after the Conception. He, however, “would not venture to say, in regard to the 25th of December, that the coincidence of the Sol novus exercised no direct or indirect influence on the ecclesiastical decision arrived at in regard to the matter.”[{25}] Professor Lake also, in his article in Hastings's “Encyclopædia,” seeks to account for the selection of December 25 without any deliberate competition with the Natalis Invicti. He points out that the Birth of Christ was fixed at the vernal equinox by certain early chronologists, on the strength of an elaborate and fantastic calculation based on Scriptural data, and connecting the Incarnation with the Creation, and that when the Incarnation came to be viewed as beginning at the Conception instead of the Birth, the latter would naturally be placed nine months later.
[ [8] Cf. chap. xviii. of Dr. Yrjö Hirn's “The Sacred Shrine” (London, 1912). Dr. Hirn finds a solitary anticipation of the Franciscan treatment of the Nativity in the Christmas hymns of the fourth-century eastern poet, Ephraem Syrus.
[ [9] No. 55 in “Hymns Ancient and Modern” (Ordinary Edition).
[ [10] No. 56 in “Hymns Ancient and Modern” (Ordinary Edition).