He spoke about as loud as Brother Milligan, but I couldn't understand much of what he was saying. I could always understand Brother Milligan, for he said the same things every time—all about dying and going to Hell and somebody putting goats on one side and sheep on the other for Judgment Day. I knew all the part about hellfire and brimstone burning and about weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But Mister Shepherd didn't even mention the fire and red-hot brimstones that Brother Milligan said were forever waiting for the damned. Mister Shepherd seemed to want everybody in the church to think about Christmas Eve instead of damnation. I was glad, because Hell is too far away to think about.
"This is a night," the schoolteacher was saying, "for the old, young, and all of us in between! How wonderful it is that you've come and brought your children and grandchildren to see the beautiful tree, to get their gifts, and to hear the story told once more.
"It's important that we keep our festive customs and traditions. They smooth the roughness of life. But it's even more important that we hold fast to our sacred beliefs and pass them down. They ease life's pain, give it purpose.
"It's a genuine pleasure being the teacher for your children this year. Every school day, from eight o'clock in the morning till four in the evening, my thirty-seven pupils and I are in our own separate world over across the branch at the schoolhouse. They're as fine a bunch as I've ever had, and I've been teaching now for seventeen years.
"Yet you can see for yourselves that if I teach these bright pupils only what is printed in the books, and if you provide only something for their dinner buckets, clothes to go on their backs, and a shelter for them at night, we all fail.
"During the short years that boys and girls are in our care, we must show them more than reading and writing and how to plant crops and how to get bread and meat on the table and how to marry and rear their own little ones. If this is all we do, we will have done no more than a 'possum that sacks its young around or any bird that tires its wings making trip after trip to the nest with worms and bugs for its fledglings. They too know how to get the necessities and to train their offspring to do the same.
"If we show children no more about life than this, that's likely all they'll ever know. The desire to search for life's full meaning, its sweetness, will never be theirs.
"I don't pretend to understand the purpose of human life. To me, the struggle to know is, in itself, almost the answer. A man strives all his days to get for himself that which is pleasant and lovely and good to think upon. Is not this a groping toward the Divine? Could it be that we were made to desire the perfect so that we would be drawn to the Almighty?
"Tonight, let's keep these questions deep in our hearts as the pupils give their pieces. Some of their recitations and skits are light, but most are serious. Through such a Christmas entertainment, we can put in the children's memories forever how God came down to man. In the years ahead this will help them, too, to struggle, to search, to hope, to hold fast."