Deeper losses would result from blotting this day from the calendar. There would be no story to tell of that wondrous birth that took place on the first Christmas morning and fixed the date from which all other events are dated. To blot Christmas out of the world we would have to blot nineteen Christian centuries from the history of the world; in truth, we would have to go farther back and dig up the roots of Hebrew history running through twenty centuries. We would have to go through the world and destroy every church and Christian institution: nearly every hospital would go down under this fell decree, and most of our schools and colleges. Our Bibles would all have to be burned, and our literature would be perforated and ripped to pieces. Furthermore, we would need to pull out of human character and life all the strands of purity and peace, of faith and love and hope, that have been woven into the hearts and lives of men by the hand of Christ. We would have to stop all our preaching and praying and hush every Christian hymn and song. We would have no word of salvation from sin, no comfort in trouble, and no hope as we look out into the beyond. The world would lose its Light and be wrapped in night.
Do we want such a world? Can we believe that God would make such a world and leave us as “infants crying in the night, infants crying for the light, and with no language but a cry”?
[XX. Has the Christmas Song Survived the World War?]
But the gentlest forces are ever the mightiest and last the longest. The sunlight is swallowed up in the storm and the very sun itself seems blotted from the heavens, but presently the blackness breaks, the clouds roll away, and the sun again smiles upon the scene, as, indeed, it had never ceased to smile. The song of the birds is hushed in the crash of thunder and the rush and roar of wind and rain, but after the storm passes their dulcet voices again sing out with fresh gladness in their song. A hammer can pound ice to powder, but every particle is still unconquered ice, and only the gentle kiss of the sun can subdue and melt it into sweet water. High explosives and poisonous gas can devastate the earth, but only the balmy breath of the springtime can clothe it in verdure and cause it to burst into bud and bloom.
The war has indeed enwrapped and in a degree wrecked the world, and the voices of peace were little heard in the storm. But now that the guns are silenced and the clouds are rolling away peace is again surging up in the heart of humanity as a passion and is at the work of clearing away the wreckage and of rebuilding the new and better world that all men hope is to emerge out of the ruins of the old. Alexander and Cæsar and Napoleon and the Kaiser—mark the anticlimax!—are gone, their swords are rust, their dreams are dust, but Jesus Christ remains the same yesterday, to-day and forever. His penetrating and persistent voice was not really silenced even during the confusion of the war, rather was he then speaking in the thunderous tones of judgment; and now the Christmas angels are being heard again as birds are heard after the storm. The hand of Christ has been shaping the course of the world, even when convulsed in war, and is now remolding its plastic elements into form. He has not been dethroned and discrowned in this world-cataclysm in which so many thrones and crowns have come tumbling down, but is still the Prince of Peace. The Man of Nazareth is speaking with a majestic voice to-day to all these nations and asserting the waste and wickedness of war and the brotherhood of man as they were never asserted before, and urging them to build a league of peace that may be the greatest outcome and blessing of the war. A new world may arise out of the ruins of the old that will be worth all the blood it cost and may be the prelude of the fulfillment of all the dreams of prophets and poets of a Parliament of Man under the rule of which “the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.” Then shall the angels’ Christmas song break from the gallery of the skies and fill all the world with its notes, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men in whom he is well pleased.”
[XXI. The Light of the World]
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Into this dark world Jesus was born. He was only a babe, a single speck in the vast mass of humanity, but this Babe was luminous and shone with heavenly light. A star shed its radiance over his cradle—symbol and prophecy of his mission. As he grew in years he grew in luminosity until he lighted up Palestine and shot some rays across the borders of that little land into the great world. Death could not quench his growing light, but he rose to heaven, as the sun rises to its zenith, whence his light now falls in increasing splendor over all the world.