ism itself took its hue from the severe Calvin, and not from the generous Luther. In Old England Presbyterianism was overpowered by Independency. In New England Non-conformity became even severer than Separatism. In such a community old Christmas was in sore peril. On both sides of the sea, indeed, in New England and in his fond ancestral seat of Old England, he was equally an outlaw. "Religion," says Neal, slyly, meaning certain forms of conduct, "was the fashion of these times." Already in 1644, while Charles I. was still King, Maypoles were ordered to be pulled down. All persons were ordered to apply themselves to the exercise of piety and religion on the Lord's day. The laws against profanity were rigorously enforced. Dancing, games, wrestling, shooting, and ringing bells for pleasure were prohibited under a penalty, and the King's indulgence for lawful sports on the Lord's day was called in. reading Common Prayer, keeping Christmas or saints' days, making minced-pies, dancing, playing cards, or playing on any instrument of music, except the drum, trumpet, and Jew's-harp. So Christmas, which the Plymouth Pilgrims had silently contemned, old Christmas, the cheerful personification in English tradition of charity and universal good feeling, of blameless gayety and religious joy, was outlawed in New England. The kindliest spirit of the old form of faith was proscribed in prohibiting Christmas; the freest spirit of the new form a spirit which John Robinson in his most famous words had foretold-was wronged in banishing Roger Williams. Such acts of the Puritans will be the gibe and scoff of Merrymount to the end of time. But those who secretly pity the fate of the revellers at Mount Wollaston, and suspect that they were really wiser and more human than their austere neighbors, have but to ask themselves whether Morton and the spirit of Morton could have founded a state upon that rigorous shore. Doubtless, as Wendell Phillips keenly says, the Puritan air was black with sermons. But it is in such an air, not in the brightness of soft lullabies and roistering choruses, that liberty took root and grew upon this continent. Mea It was plain that if such a mild offender as the May-pole was punished severely, so hoary and hardened a culprit as Christmas could expect no mercy, and he received none. In June, 1647, the Parliament abolished the observance of saints' days and "the three grand festivals" of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, "any law, statute, custom, constitution, or canon to the contrary in any wise notwith-sured by our standards, the sad-faced Puristanding." The King protested. But he tan who drove Christmas and Roger Willwas answered. In London, nevertheless, iams into exile was a sour fanatic, a narthere was an alarming disposition to ob- row and intolerant bigot. But, however serve Christmas. The mob attacked those we may describe them, history replies that who by opening their shops flouted the Melanchthon could not do the work of holiday. In several counties the disorder Luther, nor any but the Puritans themwas threatening. But Parliament took selves, and in their own way, the work of strong measures, and during the twelve the Puritans. If they denounced a goryears in which the great festivals were geous prelacy and an imposing ritual, and discountenanced there was no further tu- worshipped God in ice-cold barns and with mult, and the observance of Christmas as endless nasal prayers-if they mutilated a general holiday ceased. In New Eng-statues, and cut down pictures, and silenced land also the insidious advances of Satan were strenuously resisted. At last the formal blow fell, and Christmas had no longer a legal home either in Old or New England. In 1659 the General Court of Massachusetts enacted that "anybody who is found observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way, any such day as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings." And Peters, the old historian of Connecticut, who did not love the Puritans, and who had a malicious wit, says that one of the blue-laws of Connecticut forbade the organ peal and the surpliced choir-if they put Christmas in the stocks, and drove Roger Williams among savages, and hung Quakers and witches, they yet planted the greatest of free commonwealths, and, without professing to love or to serve liberty, they established its empire both in church and state upon immutable foundations. Certainly they gave Christmas no quarter, nor any to the Church with which it was identified. In 1665 an Episcopal chaplain came with the Commissioners of Charles II., but there was no church for him in which to hold service. Twenty years later most of the inhabitants had never seen a Church of England assembly, and there was but one Episcopal minister in the country. Yet the General Court in 1677 had agreed that no person should be hindered from performing the Episcopal service. But the repugnance of public opinion was profound, and in 1686, when Sir Edmond Andros arrived, it was one of the complaints against him that the service of the English Church had been forced into the meeting-houses. A year or two later Deacon Frairey interrupted the Episcopal minister in the midst of a burial service, for which gratification of his Non-conformist principles, although doubtless shared by a great multitude, Deacon Frairey was bound over to keep the peace. 66 The relaxation of the ancient severity was shown by the repeal in 1681 of the law prohibiting the observance of Christmas. But the repeal was bitter to old Puritanism. Four years later Judge Sewall records, with satisfaction, that carts come to town on Christmas-day, and shops are open as usual. Some, somehow, observe the day, but are vexed, I believe, that the Body of the People profane it; and, blessed be God! no Authority yet to compell them to keep it." The next year the shops and the carts give him great pleasure again, although Governor Andros does go to the Episcopal service with a redcoat on his right and a captain on his left. Eleven years later, in 1697, on the same day: "Joseph tells me that though most of the Boys went to the Church, yet he went not." In 1705 and 1706, to the judge's continued comfort, the carts still came and the shops were open. But in 1714 Christmas fell on Saturday, and because of its observance at the church the unbending judge goes to keep the Sabbath and sit down at the Lord's table with Mr. John Webb, that he may "put respect upon that affronted, despised Lord's day. For the Church of England had the Lord's supper yesterday, the last day of the week, but will not have it to-day, the day that the Lord has made." But among Puritans forbidding Christmas and spurning the other "idolatrous gear" of Episcopacy, the appearance of the Quakers denouncing Puritanism as the Puritans denounced prelacy is one of the grimmest ironies of history. Peters said of the Puritans that in New England they out-Pop'd the Pope, out-King'd the King, and out-bishop'd the bishops. But the Quakers out-Puritaned the Puritans. If the Puritans abjured prelacy and papal pomp, the Quakers testified against a Puritan hireling ministry. If the Puritans reviled the Roman Catholic churches as mass-houses, the Quakers stigmatized the Puritan churches as steeple-houses. The Puritans contemned the name of priest, and the Quakers translated into stinging prose Milton's flowing line: "New presbyter is but old priest writ large." If Judge Sewall eschewed mince-pie, and held plum-pudding at Christmas to be anathema maranatha, William Leddra and Mary Dyer reprobated Judge Sewall as guilty of denying the supremacy of the inner light, and of renouncing the colloquial yea, yea, and nay, nay, of primitive Christianity. A century ago, in a country church in Connecticut, the lineal descendant of the Puritan meeting-house, when the ancient leading and lining of the hymn gave way to modern psalmody, one of the deacons arose and left the house, crying, "Popery! popery!" But more than a century before, Lydia Wardel, a devoted Quaker, had been obliged to protest against the idolatrous gear of the Puritan church at Newbury by appearing among the scandalized congregation without any gear whatever. It is one of the unconscious jests of history that by-and-by the Quakers and the Puritans were included in a common gibe from the English Church, against which they both protested. The Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts sent a missionary to Newport, in Rhode Island, in 1704. Occasionally the good missionary, whose name survives in that of Honeyman's Hill in Newport, went up Narragansett Bay to preach at Providence, which all of the contemporary Puritan authorities regarded as a vile nest of Anabaptists or other licentious sons of Belial. Yet the practical good sense of that first of free common wealths had already appeared in the sly humor of its reply to Massachusetts when it was invoked to unite with the Bay in severe measures to repress the Quakers. Rhode Island answered, as if to show her sister colony how to deal with the matter, that the Quakers throve upon persecution, and loathed Rhode Island because it allowed them full liberty. It was but natural that in 1722, when ful, thrifty, jovial folk, they brought with them a genuine love of holidays, Christmas first of all, and then the New-Year, Passover, Whitsuntide, and San Claas or day of Saint Nicholas, the saint who gen Mr. Honeyman sought to erect a church | of the English form in Providence, he should make representations to the Society in London which caused its secretary to say of that abode of Puritan Dissenters, Quakers, and of all persons held to be un-erously filled the Christmas stocking and settled in judgment, that the people were loaded the Christmas tree, the saint who, negligent of all religion till about the with the beneficent Valentine, is the best year 1722, when the Reverend Mr. Honey- beloved of all the saintly host. man had been tilling the hard soil for While their neighbors upon Massachusome years, and that the very best of the ir-setts Bay were banning Christmas, the religious crew were "such as called them- Dutch at New Amsterdam gladly welselves Baptists or Quakers." Yet this peo-comed and honored him, and nowhere has ple who were negligent of all religion" until the prelatical missionary arrived were originally members of the Puritan Plymouth and Massachusetts churches. The church which sprang from Mr. Honeyman's zeal, St. John's Church in Providence, still stands prosperous and peaceful by Roger Williams's spring. Calvinist and Quaker and Baptist and Congregationalist and Methodist and Unitarian and Roman Catholic now dwell with it amicably side by side. Half a century ago, when the numbers of English Churchmen in the stanch old Dissenting city were few, the sonorous bell of St. John's-whose predecessor was the first church bell in Providence-rang out solitarily and blithely on Christmas-eve. To many a child in the city, bred in an austerer or a simpler rite, the airy music of that evening bell, and the cheerful church next morning, dressed with aromatic hemlock sprays, were his only Christmas. With what rapture he listened in the still night to the joyous peal proclaiming that old Christmas had come again-Christmas, so long forbid den to land upon the Western shore; Christmas of the mistletoe and Santa Claus, of the open heart and the open hand; Christmas of the quaint "idolatrous gear"-who would depart no more! So the Church, from whose fatal errors, as the Puritans held them to be, and from whose stately ritual and splendid festivals, the Pilgrims had fled to Holland and over the sea, had followed them closely with bell, book, and candle, bringing Christmas in its train. Meanwhile, how ever, the people with whom the Pilgrims had tarried in Holland, but with whom they were not willing to marry--both because they wished their posterity to be English, and because, as they alleged, of the Dutch profanation of the true holyday, the Lord's day-had also planted themselves upon this continent. A cheer he been so truly at home upon the coutinent as in the Dutch city. The character of the inhabitants naturally determined that of the day. It was less an ecclesiastical festival than a social and domestic holiday. The glittering tree of gifts was its lighted and decorated altar, and hearty good eating and drinking were its genial ceremonial rites. Hereditary Dutch pride sometimes looks askance and even angrily at Diedrich Knickerbocker's story. But it is plain that the gay exaggeration of the old chronicler only emphasized the truth, and that his humorous imaginative touch produced a likeness as accurate as that of Bradford of the Pilgrims, or that of Winthrop and Sewall of the Puritans. The tranquil, contented burghers whom he drew were sure to make the most of Christmas-tide, and their neighbors who cursed it must have seemed to them the most whimsical of lunatics. It was natural that the genius which described those burghers with so subtle a sympathy should seem to be kindred with them. Indeed, there was so much of the true Knickerbocker spirit in Irving that he is usually supposed, by those who do not reflect, to be of Dutch descent. It is this quality, perhaps, this ready sympathy with cheerful and simple domestic enjoyment, which made the author of Knickerbocker's History the laureate of English Christmas. The holiday that he describes affects him as it affected the citizen of New Amsterdam, as a day of pleasure consecrated by religious association. And the enduring popularity of his charming essay shows that this is the Christmas of the English-speaking race. Even the New England air, which was so black with sermons that it suffocated Christmas, now murmurs softly with Christmas bells. The children of the resolute God-fearing men who did not rest from labor on that first Christmas morning now rest and re joice in the happy day whose dawn is a benediction. But it is no longer a superstition of any scarlet woman, no longer a festival whose observance implies perilous adherence to papal or prelatical errors. The purifying spiritual fire, historically known as Puritanism, has purged the theological and ecclesiastical dross away, and has left the pure gold of religious faith and human sympathy. When the neophyte asked his confessor what was the central truth of Christianity, the old man answered, "Charity." Then he explained that charity meant love, and that love meant the spirit of universal fraternity. The almsgiving which is the technical interpretation of the word is but a symbol of that giving of the heart and soul and life to help others of which the supreme sacrifice of Christ is the accepted type. The day that commemorates His birth is the festival of humanity, as the inspiring sentiment of actual life. The lovely legends of the day, the stories, and the songs, and the half fairy-lore that gathers around it, the ancient traditions of dusky woods and mystic rites; the magnificence or simplicity of Christian observance, from the Pope in his triple tiara, borne upon his portative throne in gorgeous state to celebrate pontifical high mass at the great altar of St. Peter's, to George Herbert humbly kneeling in his rustic church at Bemerton, or to the bare service in some missionary chapel upon the American frontier; the lighting of Christmas trees and hanging up of Christmas stockings, the profuse giving, the happy family meetings, the dinner, the game, the dance they are all the natural signs and symbols, the flower and fruit, of Christmas. For Christmas is the day of days which declares the universal human consciousness that peace on earth comes only from good-will to man. THE SUPPER OF ST. GREGORY. And the monk answered: "All I have In Christ's name take thou it, and live." Years passed; and, called at last to bear The pastoral crook and keys of Rome, Sat the crowned lord of Christendom. "Prepare a feast," St. Gregory cried, "And let twelve beggars sit thereat." The beggars came, and one beside, An unknown stranger, with them sat. "I asked thee not," the Pontiff spake, I bid thee welcome, for the sake Of Him who is thy Lord and mine." A grave, calm face the stranger raised, Whose form was as the Son of God. |