s--the great
drama of Redemption. Not upon the course of the temporal sun through the
zodiac, but upon the mystical progress of the eternal Sun of
Righteousness must she base her calendar. Christmas and New Year's
Day--the two festivals stood originally for the most opposed of
principles.

Naturally the Church fought bitterly against the observance of the
Kalends; she condemned repeatedly the unseemly doings of Christians in
joining in heathenish customs at that season; she tried to make the first
of January a solemn fast; and from the ascetic point of view she was
profoundly right, for the old festivals were bound up with a lusty
attitude towards the world, a seeking for earthly joy and well-being.

The struggle between the ascetic principle of self-mortification,
world-renunciation, absorption in a transcendent ideal, and the natural
human striving towards earthly joy and well-being, is, perhaps, the most
interesting aspect of the history of Christianity; it is certainly shown
in an absorbingly interesting way in the development of the Christian
feast of the Nativity. The conflict is keen at first; the Church
authorities fight tooth and nail against these relics of heathenism,
these devilish rites; but mankind's instinctive paganism is
insuppressible, the practices continue as ritual, though losing much of
their meaning, and the Church, weary of denouncing, comes to wink at
them, while the pagan joy in earthly life begins to colour her own
festival.

The Church's Christmas, as the Middle Ages pass on, becomes increasingly
"merry"--warm and homely, suited to the instincts of ordinary humanity,
filled with a joy that is of this earth, and not only a mystical rapture
at a transcendental Redemption. The Incarnate God becomes a real child to
be fondled and rocked, a child who is the loveliest of infants, whose
birthday is the supreme type of all human birthdays, and may be kept with
feasting and dance and song. Such is the Christmas of popular tradition,
the Nativity as it is reflected in the carols, the cradle-rocking, the
mystery plays of the later Middle Ages. This |27| Christmas, which
still lingers, though maimed, in some Catholic regions, is strongly
life-affirming; the value and delight of earthly, material things is
keenly felt; sometimes, even, it passes into coarseness and riot. Yet a
certain mysticism usually penetrates it, with hints that this dear life,
this fair world, are not all, for the soul has immorta