he sentiment of joy
that animated them when they received the intelligence that a Saviour was
born." At the Midnight Mass crowds of people who, perhaps, had been
traversing the streets the whole night, came into the church |98| with
their tambourines and guitars, and accompanied the organ. The Mass over,
they began to dance in the very body of the church.{18} A later writer
speaks of the Midnight Mass in Madrid as a fashionable function to which
many gay young people went in order to meet one another.{19} Such is the
character of the service in the Spanish-American cities. In Lima the
streets on Christmas Eve are crowded with gaily dressed and noisy folks,
many of them masked, and everybody goes to the Mass.{20} In Paris the
elaborate music attracts enormous and often not very serious crowds. In
Sicily there is sometimes extraordinary irreverence at the midnight
services: people take provisions with them to eat in church, and from
time to time go out to an inn for a drink, and between the offices they
imitate the singing of birds.{21} We may see in such things the licence
of pagan festivals creeping within the very walls of the sanctuary.

In the Rhineland Midnight Mass has been abolished, because the
conviviality of Christmas Eve led to unseemly behaviour at the solemn
service, but Mass is still celebrated very early--at four or five--and
great crowds of worshippers attend. It is a stirring thing, this first
Mass of Christmas, in some ancient town, when from the piercing cold, the
intense stillness of the early morning, one enters a great church
thronged with people, bright with candles, warm with human fellowship,
and hears the vast congregation break out into a slow solemn chorale,
full of devout joy that

"In Bethlehem geboren
Ist uns ein Kindelein."

It is interesting to trace survivals of the nocturnal Christmas offices
in Protestant countries. In German "Evangelical" churches, midnight or
early morning services were common in the eighteenth century; but they
were forbidden in some places because of the riot and drunkenness which
accompanied them. The people seem to have regarded them as a part of
their Christmas revellings rather than as sacred functions; one writer
compares the congregation to a crowd of wild drunken sailors in a |99|
tavern, another gives disgusting particulars of disorders in a church
where the only sober man was the preacher.{22}

In Sweden the Christmas service is performed very e