But we heed not enlarge upon the prevalence of this evil. The speakers at the Congress recognized it frankly, and they are undoubtedly aware, though they may not have deemed it prudent to confess, that the case is growing more and more serious all the time. As wealth concentrates in the large cities and habits of luxury increase, the Protestant Episcopal Church is continually becoming colder and colder towards the poor. No remedy that has been proposed holds out the faintest promise of stopping this alarming decline. No remedy proposed even meets the approbation of any considerable number of the Episcopal clergy. One speaker proposes a greater number of free congregations, and is met by the obvious objection that the result would be a still more lamentable separation between rich and poor, with a different class of churches for each set. Another recommends the bishops to send missionary preachers into every parish where there seems to be need of their labor, but does not tell us where the missionaries are to be found, and forgets that almost every parish in the United States would have to be supplied in this way before the evil could be cured. A third advises the rich and poor to meet together, and fraternize and help each other; and a fourth calls for more zeal all around. All these proposals are merely various ways of stating the disease; they do not indicate remedies. Perhaps it may occur to some people that if the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church correspond so closely in their outward operations, both striving to celebrate divine worship with all possible splendor, both building costly churches and supporting them by pew-rents, both employing highly paid choirs, both keeping up a system of parishes, and if all the while the one gathers people of every rank and condition into her fold, offering health and consolation to all alike, while the other is constantly losing the affections of the multitude and becoming a lifeless creature of forms and fashions, the explanation of the difference after all may be that the Holy Ghost lives and works in the one, while the other is only the device of man.
YULE RAPS.
A CHRISTMAS STORY.
We once saw a picture of a wide, undulating snow-landscape, overspread with a pale rosy tint from the west, and we thought it a fancy picture of an Arctic winter. It hung in a pretty room in a Silesian country-house. The weather was lovely, warm but temperate; it was mid-June, and the woods were full of wild strawberries, and the meadows of forget-me-nots. Yet that landscape was simply Silesia in the winter; the same place, six months later, becomes a wilderness of snow. What shall we say of Mecklenburg, then, so much farther to the north of Silesia? But even there winter brings merriment; and as in these snow-bound countries there is less work to be got through in the winter, their people associate the ideas of pleasure and holiday with the cold rather than the warm weather. In Mecklenburg spring, summer, and autumn mean work—ploughing, sowing, haying, harvesting; winter means fun and frolic, peasants’ dances, farmers’ parties, weddings, christenings, harvest-homes, Christmas, New Year’s, and Epiphany presents, gatherings of friends, fireside talk, innocent games, and general merriment.
In a little village in this province the house of Emanuel Köhler was famous for its jollity. Here were old customs well kept up, yet always with decorum and a regard to higher matters. Emanuel was virtually master of the estate of Stelhagen, the absentee owner of which was a gay young officer who never wrote to his agent, except for a new supply of money. Clever and enlightened an agriculturist as old Köhler was, it was sometimes difficult for him to send the required sums, and yet have enough to farm the estate to his satisfaction. In the language of the country, he was called the inspector, and his house, also according to the local custom, was a kind of informal agricultural school. At the time of our story he had four young men under him—who were in all respects like the apprentices of the good old time—and two of his own relatives, his son and his nephew. His only daughter was busy helping her mother, and learning to be as efficient a housekeeper as the young men to be first-rate farmers; and this nucleus of young society, added to the good Köhler’s hearty joviality and the known good-cheer always provided by Frau Köhler, naturally made the large, cosey, rambling house a pleasant rendezvous for the neighborhood. The Köhler household was a host in itself, yet it always loved to be reinforced on festive occasions by the good people of the village and farms within ten miles round. So also the children, whether poor or pretty well off, were all welcome at old Emanuel’s, and knew the way to the Frau Inspectorin’s pantry as well as they knew the path to the church or the school. All the servant-girls in the neighborhood wanted to get a place in this house, but there was scarcely ever a vacancy, unless one of the dairy-maids or the house-girls married. Frau Köhler and her daughter did all the kitchen work themselves, and the latter, a thoughtful girl, though she was only fifteen, studied books and maps between-whiles. But her studies never interfered with the more necessary knowledge that a girl should have when, as Rika,[175] she has to depend upon herself for everything. In the country, in the Mecklenburg of even a very few years ago, everything was home-made, and a supply of things from the large town twenty or thirty miles off was the event of a life-time. Such things came as wedding-gifts; and though fancy things came every Christmas, even they were carefully and sacredly kept as tokens of that miraculous, strange, bewildering world outside, in which people wore their silk dresses every day, and bought everything they wanted at large shops a few steps from their own houses. Frau Köhler often wondered what other women did who had no farm-house to manage, no spinning, or knitting, or cooking, or dairy-work to do; and when her daughter Rika suggested that they probably read and studied, she shrugged her shoulders and said: “Take care, child; women ought to attend to women’s work. Studying is a man’s business.”
The honest soul was a type of many an old-fashioned German house-mother, of whose wisdom it were well that some of our contemporaries could avail themselves; and when Rika gently reminded her of the story of Martha and Mary, she would energetically reply:
“Very well; but take my word for it, child, there was a woman more blessed than that Mary, and one who was nearer yet to her Lord; and we do not hear of her neglecting her house. I love to think of that house at Nazareth as just a model of household cleanliness and comfort. You know, otherwise, it could not have been a fitting place for Him; for though he chose poverty, he must needs have surrounded himself with spotless purity.”
And Rika, as humble and docile as she was thoughtful, saw in this reverent and practical surmise a proof that it is not learning that comes nearest to the heart of truth, but that clearer and directer knowledge which God gives to “babes and sucklings.”
This particular Christmas there was much preparation for the family festival. The kitchen was in a ferment for a week, and mighty bakings took place; gingerbread and cake were made, and various confectionery-work was done; for Frau Köhler expected a friend of her own early home to come and stay with her this last week of the year. This was the good old priest who had baptized her daughter; for neither mother nor daughter were natives of Mecklenburg, though the latter had grown up there, and had never, since she was six months old, gone beyond the limits of the large estate which her father administered. Frau Köhler was a Bavarian by birth, and had grieved very much when her Mecklenburg husband had taken her to this northern land, where his position and wages were so good as to make it his duty to abide and bring up his family. But the worthy old creature had done a wonderful deal of good since she had been there, and kept up her faith as steadfastly as ever she had at home. Frederika had been her treasure and her comfort; and between the mother’s intense, mediæval firmness of belief, and the child’s naturally deep and thoughtful nature, the little farm-maiden had grown up a rare combination of qualities, and a model for the young Catholic womanhood of our stormy times. The old priest whom Frau Köhler had looked up to before her marriage as her best friend, and whom Rika had been taught to revere from her babyhood, had been very sick, and was obliged to leave his parish for a long holiday and rest. His former parishioner was anxious that he should see Christmas kept in the old-fashioned northern style, more characteristic than the Frenchified southern manners would now allow, even in her remote native village. Civilization carries with it the pick-axe and the rule; and when young girls begin to prefer Manchester prints and French bonnets to homespun and straw hats, most of the old customs slip away from their homes.