the
character of the festival for which it stands.

|25| Into the midst of this season of revelry and licence the Church
introduced her celebration of the beginning of man's redemption from the
bondage of sin. Who can wonder that Christmas contains incongruous
elements, for old things, loved by the people, cannot easily be uprooted.

IV. One more name yet remains to be considered, _Yule_ (Danish _Jul_),
the ordinary word for Christmas in the Scandinavian languages, and not
extinct among ourselves. Its derivation has been widely discussed, but so
far no satisfactory explanation of it has been found. Professor Skeat in
the last edition of his Etymological Dictionary (1910) has to admit that
its origin is unknown. Whatever its source may be, it is clearly the name
of a Germanic season--probably a two-month tide covering the second half
of November, the whole of December, and the first half of January.{26}
It may well suggest to us the element added to Christmas by the barbarian
peoples who began to learn Christianity about the time when the festival
was founded. Modern research has tended to disprove the idea that the old
Germans held a Yule feast at the winter solstice, and it is probable, as
we shall see, that the specifically Teutonic Christmas customs come from
a New Year and beginning-of-winter festival kept about the middle of
November. These customs transferred to Christmas are to a great extent
religious or magical rites intended to secure prosperity during the
coming year, and there is also the familiar Christmas feasting,
apparently derived in part from the sacrificial banquets that marked the
beginning of winter.

* * * * *

We have now taken a general glance at the elements which have combined in
Christmas. The heathen folk-festivals absorbed by the Nativity feast were
essentially life-affirming, they expressed the mind of men who said "yes"
to this life, who valued earthly good things. On the other hand
Christianity, at all events in its intensest form, the religion of the
monks, was at bottom pessimistic as regards this earth, and valued it
only as a place of discipline for the life to come; it was essentially a
religion of renunciation that said "no" to the world. The |26| Christian
had here no continuing city, but sought one to come. How could the
Church make a feast of the secular New Year; what mattered to her the
world of time? her eye was fixed upon the eternal realitie