Country Church, Christmas Morning.—Page 290.
Immediately after the services of the day, the country gentleman stood of old, at his own gate (as we have represented him at [page 109]), and superintended the distribution of alms to the aged and the destitute. The hall, prepared for the festival of himself and his friends, was previously opened to his tenants and retainers; and the good things of the season were freely dispensed to all. "There was once," says the writer of "Round about our Coal Fire," "hospitality in the land. An English gentleman at the opening of the great day had all his tenants and neighbors enter his hall by daybreak; the strong beer was broached, and the black-jacks went plentifully about, with toast, sugar, nutmeg, and good Cheshire cheese. . . . The servants were then running here and there with merry hearts and jolly countenances. Every one was busy in welcoming of guests, and looked as snug as new-licked puppies. The lasses were as blithe and buxom as the maids in good Queen Bess's days, when they ate sirloins of roast-beef for breakfast. Peg would scuttle about to make a toast for John, while Tom run harum-scarum to draw a jug of ale for Margery."
Of this scene we have given a representation at [page 42]; and much of this ancient spirit, we hope and believe, still survives in this Christian country. The solemn festivals of ancient superstition were marked either by bloody sacrifice, secret revelling, or open licentiousness. There was no celebration of rites, real or symbolical, which might become a religion of cheerfulness, decency, and mercy. There was no medium between a mysteriousness dark and gloomy as the grave, and a wild and savage enthusiasm or riotous frenzy, which mingled with the worship of the gods the impassioned depravity of human nature. From Moloch, upon whose dreadful altar children were offered, to Bacchus, at whose shrine reason and virtue were prostrated, there were none of the fabled deities of antiquity whose service united the spirit of devotion with innocent pleasures and the exercise of the domestic charities. This was reserved for the Christian religion, one of the marks of whose divinity it is that it can mingle with many of the pleasures, and all the virtues of the world, without sullying the purity of its glory,—without depressing the sublime elevation of its character. The rites of Ceres were thought profaned if the most virtuous believer of the divinity of that goddess beheld them without having undergone the ceremonies of special initiation. The worship of Saturn gave rise to a liberty inconsistent with the ordinary government of states. At the altar of Diana, on certain days, the Spartans flogged children to death. And the offerings which on state occasions the Romans made to Jupiter, were such as feudal vassals might offer to their warlike lord. But now, thank God!—to use the words of Milton's Hymn on the Nativity,—
"Peor and Baalim
Forsake their temples dim,
With that twice-batter'd God of Palestine;
And mooned Ashtaroth
Heaven's queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine;
The Lybick Hammon shrinks his horn;
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.
"And sullen Moloch, fled,
Has left in shadows dread
His burning idol all of blackest hue;
In vain with cymbals' ring,
They call the grisly king,
In dismal dance about the furnace blue:
The brutish Gods of Nile as fast,
Iris, and Orus, and the dog Anubis haste.
"Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian grove or green,
Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud;
Nor can he be at rest,
Within his sacred chest;
Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud.
In vain, with timbrelled anthems dark,
The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipp'd ark.
"He feels from Judah's land
The dreaded Infant's hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne;
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide;
Not Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe, to show his God-head true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew."
Oh! how different were those religions of the passions and the senses from that of the sentiments and pure affections of the Christian heart; which, as it rises to heaven in sublime devotion, expands in charity towards its kind, until it comprehends all humanity in the bond of universal benevolence. To ameliorate the temporal, as well as elevate the spiritual state of man, is its distinguishing excellence, the sublime peculiarity of its character as a religious dispensation. All the systems of superstition were external and gross, or mysterious and occult. They either encouraged the follies and the passions of men, or by a vain and fruitless knowledge flattered their vanity. But Christianity came to repress the one and to dissipate the other; to make the exercise of the virtues the result and the proof of mental attachment to the doctrines which, while they afford grand subjects of eternal interest, contain the principles of all true civilization. It is in this religion alone that faith is the sister of charity; that the former brightens with the beams of another world the institutions by which the latter blesses this,—those institutions of mercy and of instruction which cover the land with monuments of humanity that are nowhere to be found but among the temples of our faith.
And now, when silent and desolate are even the high places over which Augustus ruled, fallen majestic Rome with all her gods, the religion proclaimed to the humble shepherds, whose sound was first heard by the moonlight streams and under the green boughs, has erected on the ruins of ancient grandeur a sublimer dominion than all those principalities of the earth which refused its hospitality. It came in gentleness and lowliness and the spirit of peace; and now it grasps the power of the universe, and wields the civilized energies of the greatest of all the nations to the beneficent extension of its authority,—imperishable in its glory, and bloodless in its triumphs!
Bringing in the Boar's Head.—Page 295.
On the opposite side, our artist has given a lively and correct representation of the high festival anciently celebrated on Christmas Day in the old baronial hall; and has presented it at that important moment when the procession of the boar's head is making its way, with the customary ceremonies, to the upper table. Our account of Christmas would not be complete without some notice of this grand dish at the feasts of our ancestors, and some description of the forms which attended its introduction.