“Glory to God in the highest,” they sang, “and on earth, peace, good will toward men.”
Can you not imagine how the children gazed up through the gloom, expecting to see the white-winged angels hovering down towards them? And though the grown-up people knew that the music came from the singing boys placed in a gallery high up over the windows, they too must have felt that the message was a heavenly one, and many of them were filled with awe. And now, when the beautiful voices were silent, the shepherds began to crowd towards the altar. There, kneeling before the manger, they adored the Baby and His Mother, and afterwards, walking in procession through the church, past the watching crowd, they sang a hymn of praise.
This was the scene which in numberless churches all over England took place six hundred years ago on Christmas Eve, and even now a memory of it dwells at Christmas-time in many churches.
Nearly every church in Roman Catholic countries gives up one of its little chapels to a representation of the stable at Bethlehem. The actors are no longer real, but figures of Joseph and Mary and the shepherds take their place.
In Italy, the Christmas “manger scene” in the churches is often very elaborate. I remember one in a church just outside Florence, before which there was always a crowd of little children staring in delight. The whole of a tiny chapel was turned into a sort of cave or grotto, with winding paths from the heights, down which came figures to represent the Wise Men from the East, with toy camels and leopards following them. In the midst of the grotto there was a straw-filled manger, and in it lay the Baby Jesus. The Virgin Mary with clasped hands knelt beside it, and Joseph, leaning on his staff, looked over her shoulder at the Child. A group of shepherds with crooks knelt near the Holy Family, while their woolly toy flocks were huddled round them.
At Easter-time also, six hundred years ago, the people in England were taught by means of acting that Easter means the Resurrection of Christ from the dead.
Before the altar, a grave was prepared, and at a certain part of the service, choristers, representing the women who went to the sepulchre, walked up the aisle, bearing the spices and the ointments. When they arrived at the grave, they found seated beside it an angel, who said, “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.”
Then the story as it is told in the Bible went on, acted by the clergy, till one of them, representing Christ Himself, appeared to the rest, announcing that He had risen from the grave. At this point the whole choir burst into songs of “Alleluia,” and the play ended.
Like the “manger scene,” a memory of this old play persists in some religious customs which still linger. In Italy, if you go to any of the churches just before Easter, you will see in front of one of the altars something that looks like a little garden of flowers. There are tubs of blossoming shrubs; masses of tulips and daffodils and anemones, some in pots, some in jars of water, and amongst the flowers you will find, cut in wood perhaps, and painted to look as real as possible, the spear, the nails, the cross—all the terrible things that were used at the Crucifixion. And this little “arranged” plot of colour and scent is called The Sepulchre. The Easter play is acted no more, but it is a beautiful thought to make a garden in memory of it, to show that death is conquered. For the “sepulchre” holds not death, but life—the lovely life of flowers.
This, you see, is another way of teaching people the meaning of the Resurrection.