Christmas Eve

( Christmas Eve and Easter Day : London, 1850.) Two poems on the same subject from different points of view. The scene is a country chapel, a barnlike structure, from which ornament has been rigorously excluded, not so much on account of want of funds as horror of anything which should detract from “Gospel simplicity.” The night is stormy, and Christmas Day must have fallen on a Monday that year, or surely no worshippers in that building would have troubled themselves about keeping the vigil of such a “Popish feast” as Christmas. It must have been Sunday night as well as Christmas Eve, that year of ’49. The congregation eyed the stranger “much as some wild beast,” for “not many wise” were called to worship in their particular way, and the stranger was evidently not of their faith or cla . In came the flock: the fat woman with a wreck of an umbrella; the little old-faced, battered woman with the baby, wringing the ends of her poor shawl soaking with the rain; then a “female something” in dingy satins; next a tall, yellow man, like the Penitent Thief; and from him, as from all, the interloper got the same surprised glance. “What, you, Gallio, here!” it expre ed. And so, after a shoemaker’s lad, with a wet apron round his body and a bad cough inside it, had pa ed in, the interloper followed and took his place, waiting for his portion of New Testament meat, like the rest of them. What with the hot smell of greasy coats and frowsy gowns, combined with the preacher’s stupidity, the visitor soon had enough of it, and he “flung out of the little chapel” in disgust. As he pa ed out he found there was a lull in the rain and wind. The moon was up, and he walked on, glad to be in the open air, his mind full of the scene he had left. After all, why should he be hard on this case? In many modes the same thing was going on everywhere—the endeavour to make you believe—and with much about the same effect. He had his own church; Nature had early led him to its door; he had found God visibly present in the immensities, and with the power had recognised his love too as the nobler dower. Quite true was it that God stood apart from man—apart, that he might have room to act and use his gifts of brain and heart. Man was not perfect, not a machine, not unaware of his fitne to pray and praise. He looked up to God, recognised how infinitely He surpa ed man in power and wisdom, and was convinced He would never in His love bestow le than man requires. In this great way he would seek to pre towards God; let men seek Him in a narrow shrine if they would. And as he mused thus, suddenly the rain ceased and the moon shone out, the black clouds falling beneath her feet; a moon rainbow, vast and perfect, rose in its chorded colours. Then from out the world of men the worshipper of God in Nature was called, and at once and with terror he saw Him with His human air, the back of Him—no more. He had been present in the poor chapel—He, with His sweeping garment, vast and white, whose hem could just be recognised by the awed beholder, He who had promised to be where two or three should meet to pray—and He had been present as the friend of these poor folk! He was leaving him who had despised the friends of the Human-Divine. Then he clung to the salvation of His vesture, and told Him how he had thought it best He should be worshipped in spirit and becoming beauty; the uncouth worship he had just left was scarcely fitted for Him. Then the Lord turned His whole face upon him, and he was caught up in the whirl of the vestment, and was up-borne through the darkne and the cold, and held awful converse with his God; and then he came to know who registers the cup of cold water given for His sake, and who disdains not to slake His Divine thirst for love at the poorest love ever offered—came to know it was for this he was permitted to cling to the vesture himself. And so they cro ed the world till they stopped at the miraculous dome of God, St. Peter’s Church at Rome, with its colonnade like outstretched arms, as if desiring to embrace all mankind. The whole interior of the vast basilica is alive with worshippers this Christmas Eve. It is the midnight ma of the Feast of the Nativity under Rome’s great dome. The incense rises in clouds; the organ holds its breath and grovels latent, as if hushed by the touch of God’s finger. The silence is broken only by the shrill tinkling of a silver bell. Very man and Very God upon the altar lies, and Christ has entered, and the man whom He brought clinging to His garment’s fold is left outside the door, for He must be within, where so much of love remains, though the man without is to wait till He return: “He will not bid me enter too, But rather sit as I now do.” He muses as he remains in the night air, shut out from the glory and the worship within, and he desires to enter. He thinks he can see the error of the worshippers; but he is sure also that he can see the love, the power of the Crucified One, which swept away the poetry, rhetoric and art of old Rome and Greece, “till filthy saints rebuked the gust” which gave them the glimpse of a naked Aphrodite. Love shut the world’s eyes, and love sufficed. Again he is caught up in the vesture’s fold, and transferred this time to a lecture-hall in a university town in Germany, where a hawk-nosed, high-cheek-boned profe or, with a hacking cough, is giving a Christmas Eve discourse on the Christ myth. He was just discu ing the point whether there ever was a Christ or not, and the Saviour had entered here also; but He would not bid His companion enter “the exhausted air-bell of the critic.” Where Papist with Di enter struggles the air may become mephitic; but the German left no air to poison at all. He rejects Christ as known to Christians; yet he retains somewhat. Is it His intellect that we must reverence? But Christ taught nothing which other sages had not taught before, and who did not damage their claim by a uming to be one with the Creator. Are we to worship Christ, then, for His goodne ? But goodne is due from man to man, still more to God, and does not confer on its po e or the right to rule the race. Besides, the goodne of Christ was either self-gained or inspired by God. On neither ground could it substantiate His claim to put Himself above us. We praise Nature, not Harvey, for the circulation of the blood; so we look from the gift to the Giver—from man’s dust to God’s divinity. What is the point of stre in Christ’s teaching? “Believe in goodne and truth, now understood for the first time”? or “Believe in Me, who lived and died, yet am Lord of Life”? And all the time Christ remains inside this lecture-room. Could it be that there was anything which a Christian could be in accord with there? The profe or has pounded the pearl of price to dust and ashes, yet he does not bid his hearers sweep the dust away. No; he actually gives it back to his hearers, and bids them carefully treasure the precious remains, venerate the myth, adore the man as before! And so the listener resolved to value religion for itself, be very carele as to its sects, and thus cultivate a mild indifferentism; when, lo! the storm began afresh, and the black night caught him and whirled him up and flung him prone on the college-step. Christ was gone, and the vesture fast receding. It is borne in upon him then that there must be one best way of worship. This he will strive to find and make other men share, for man is linked with man, and no gain of his must remain unshared by the race. He caught at the vanishing robe, and, once more lapped in its fold, was seated in the little chapel again, as if he had never left it, never seen St. Peter’s succe or nor the profe or’s laboratory. The poor folk were all there as before—a disagreeable company, and the sermon had just reached its “tenthly and lastly.” The English was ungrammatical; in a word, the water of life was being dispensed with a strong taint of the soil in a poor earthen ve el. This, he thinks, is his place; here, to his mind, is “Gospel simplicity”; he will criticise no more. Notes. —Sect. ii., “ a carer for none of it, a Gallio ”: “And Gallio cared for none of these things” (Acts xviii. 17). “ A Saint John’s candlestick ” (see Rev. i. 20). “ Christmas Eve of ’Forty-nine ”: Di enters do not keep Christmas Eve, nor Christmas Day itself; they would not, therefore, have been found at chapel unle Christmas happened to fall on a Sunday. In 1849 Christmas Eve fell on a Monday. Sect. x., the baldachin : the canopy over the high altar of St. Peter’s at Rome is supported by magnificent twisted brazen columns, from designs by Bernini. It is 95 feet in height, and weighs about 93 tons. The high altar stands immediately over the tomb of St. Peter. Sect. xiv., “ Göttingen, most likely ”: a celebrated university of Germany, which has produced many eminent Biblical critics. Neander and Ewald were natives of Göttingen. Sect. xvi.,— “ When A got leave an Ox to be, No Camel (quoth the Jews) like G. ” The letter Aleph, in Hebrew, was suggested by an ox’s head and horns. Gimel, the Hebrew letter G, means camel. Sect. xviii., “ anapæsts in comic-trimeter ”: in prosody an anapæst is a foot consisting of three syllables; the first two short, and the third long. A trimeter is a division of verse consisting of three measures of two feet each. “ The halt and maimed ‘Iketides’ ”: The Suppliants , an incomplete play of Æschylus, called “maimed” because we have only a portion of it extant. Sect. xxii., breccia , a kind of marble.