Editorial December 25, 1943 Issue

What Christmas Represents

Evelyn F. Heywood

The Christian Scientist learns to approach and to celebrate Christmas not as the anniversary of a mortal event, thought of with awe and wonder; not as a time for mere present-giving and festivity. He sees in the coming of the Christ to human consciousness heralded in the birth of Jesus the evidence that the man of God's creating— the man whom Christian Science reveals as the only man—has been given dominion over matter, over all phases of mortality. In profound gratitude and in conscious alertness to his own responsibility to prove, even as did the Master, his divine origin, he sees in each Christmastide an opportunity to reaffirm his spiritual sonship, his own identification, with the Christ-appearing.

On page 260 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany," Mary Baker Eddy writes: "The basis of Christmas is the rock, Christ Jesus; its fruits are inspiration and spiritual understanding of joy and rejoicing,— not because of tradition, usage, or corporeal pleasures, but because of fundamental and demonstrable truth, because of the heaven within us."

Christmas then, in the light of Christian Science, does not only commemorate the greatest of all gifts to humanity, foreshadowed by prophets and earnestly longed for by mankind, the coming of the Christ to human consciousness, delivering men from sin and suffering; it proclaims its present universal availability.

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