Article January 29, 1910 Issue

It is a curious exercise to look back through the years...

Detroit (Mich.) News

It is a curious exercise to look back through the years and see how many great minds have agreed that the golden age is only the Christmas spirit carried into all the months. Not the buying and selling, the giving of trinkets and toys, for that is not the biggest thing in even the most ordinary Christmas, but the spirit of good will to men, the spirit that will not be party to the offending of the poorest child, the spirit that seeks out the unfortunates so that Christmas, of all the days of the year, will not be marred like other days by having our plenty spell the want of others. That is the spirit which is going to complete this world and make it the finest habitation in God's universe. And when the day of completion is fully come, not a company of angels, but a whole race, will chant the Gloria of the first Christmas, and the whirring wheels of factories and the hum of stores and the business of banks and the various activities of the workaday world will be but the diapason of the song.

It is coming—the Christmas spirit three hundred and sixty-five days in the year! Men are groping after it in all sorts of ways, wise and unwise. The human family is straitened until the new relation between men be accomplished. Men who say the philosophy of the Christ is impracticable are ofttimes the very ones who are doing most to make it practicable. Men who scout the story of the miracles, are today devoting themselves, mind and body, to doing work in the spirit which wrought the miracles. Men who balk at the hard saying of the cloak and the added mile, are giving greater gifts than these to a people that does not always appreciate them, and in an hundred thousand ways the spirit of the Christ is becoming regnant in the lives of men. If you despair of the world, this is true of you—you are out of touch with the best things in it. If you say the world is cold, you have not by your charity brought yourself in touch with the staggering amount of unselfishness displayed every day by persons who wear no tags and belong to no societies. If you say religion is dying out as a moving force, be sure of this—you are not in a position to know anything about it. No man who stands near the heart of things can doubt the widening of the frontier of the kingdom of kindness. One of the surprises that await the careful observer is the almost unbelievable increase of true religion in the world, and he who decries the indifference of the people has need to look to his own condition. The Christ has walked through our churches and emptied some of them, because he has sent his people into the highways and byways on the missions he loved best to fulfil.

This is the Christmas spirit that has found its way into all the months. If it continues to grow as it has been growing, it will be difficult to tell when the festival rolls around, for Christ will be born in some divine passion for humanity every day. Not so very many decades ago a lowly stable held every person in the world who loved the little Jewish babe. Today a world does him homage,—the wise men of the west along with the wise men of the east, the artisan of America as well as the shepherds on night watch in Palestine, all the mothers of men as well as she who was so inexpressibly exalted among women. There is no theology in this homage, any more than there is anatomy in your friendship for your friend. It is the human spirit answering unto the master of the human spirit, and acknowledging the authority of Jesus as the supreme teacher of rational, serene, and happy life; for as far as the race has followed his teachings, that far have the rough places been made smooth and the drear places pleasant.

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