The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, December 17, 1905, Page 18

- X e, 7 A @ e .'%@‘» % o/, A\ %(,'o oA b £ é'g &.;%° 2:U® N\ FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL 93 hristmas is a miatter that can v treated, for the attitude of d this festival depends em=~ stiens in t city or vicin- the teachings of Christ. To in 2 lucid and intelligivle ome somewhat Bistorical from Its first#introduction tje-effect of the at- ts toward the Jewish people, fable of the wolf and the lamb would seem to have € st ot hosed to describe-the feeling and disposi- toward Jews found in their ¢ early and middle ages, lized countries to-day. The after attending service on rned upom his Jewish friend and com- 1iiy pecause he had for the first time Jews killed Christ, may still be the cause those who hear it, and yet it is nearly be taken aeriously. ‘A parallel &tory is of the martyrdom of the ten Sages. t one of the Roman Emperors who was ry t destruction of Jerusalem had ten of t s summoned before him to inquire vhen they were assembled he asked kly and truthfully the verdict In a 1ol se béen caught stealing onc of his enslave him or sell him; and th honest me ed, “The thief shall die.” “In that case,” hife- recorded here of your ancestors that brethren to the Ishmaelites for Wi If they had been living I would Bave to trial in your presence, but now you must ty of your fathers,” and they were executed. nd of justice that has been meted out to the e very rise of Christianity. ' In the early and when at Eaéter and Christmas the popular sed and the people's passions were Infuri- exaggerated accounts of the crucifixion, no fe to be outside his house on those festive Tor that matter felt secure in home, barricaded it. In fact, Christmas day was ng and fasting, and the N Tes t be- ime & proscribed book to the Jew, not to at‘that they should execrate the name and of him whose teachings, judging by the atrociti i upon them in the pame of Christ and Christi ompted the unnamable and inhuman outrages ed r ranks each of affairs is lament niq his it 1s not unknown to-day e ar i What Christmas [Means RGN GG BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D. D. o h peacs and good will toward all men. T IS a great satisfaction that we can say this of Christ- And as the nations which celebrate Christmas in the province of God, the ruling nations of the whether by force of arms or by the success of by “thirst for the horizan,” t. es some of those races, 1 suppose that :ople will engage In Christmas festivities who the Savior of men, or having heard of him, >w nothing about him or his birth. It was a very pathetic thing, a few years ago, when to who were enrolled jn the Boer codntry day ‘Without any flag of truce, without y professed mgreement, all hostility was suspended on tmas day. Picket did not exchange shots with picket, r that day men did not study war. There was a story, cryphal, of a mortar which sent a plum pudding valley two or three miles wide. Let us hope that are, world, a certain ever hea those armies came. across a the story is not apocryphal; or if it were.a myth, let some of the many poets who will read these lnes accept it so far as to write a Christmas ode describing the flight of that plum pudding, for us to print when another year comes round . The Christmas of the Northern Christmas and always has been. nations is a winter Till Captain Cook's day, and later, the Northern nations have had the principal word fn literature, In history, and especlally in song. If the Quéeh of Sheba had court poets, and I suppose she had, the papyrus on which they wrote down their poems has long since rotted, and perhaps they had some superstition which prevented them from carving their odes on any monoliths of their day. But now, when we have the Cape Town Ad- ve r and the Melbourne Bugle and the Tasmania Chatterer and the Dunedin Delight and the Bagle fluttering ts wings in the New Hebrides, nay, very soon the Figaro vhich will be published in Wilkes Land, or some other section of the Antarctic continent, now in these later days Southern clvilization, Christmas will have to adapt itself and new festivities. Heap on more wood! the wind is chill; But Jet it whistle as it will, We'll keep our Christmas merry still. t “Good Sir Walter, save him, God.,” wrote he sent Marmion out into the world, and he on to say. Each age has deemed the new-born year The fittest time for festa] cheer. And he described as no one but he could, a Norseman's nas. as the Danes Danced round the blazing pile, They make such barbarous mirth the while As best might to the mind recall - The bolsterous joys of Odin's ball. And then he turns to the Christian celebration. On Christmas eve the bells were rung; Christmas eve the mass was sung. vhich we reprint for the reader who is lying under Im trec on the beach at Invercargill, conferring with . Reader as to the way in which they shall keep the children from killing themselves under the hot sun which will hardly sct before it is ready to rise again. In our Northern poetry. Yes! We hdve been apt to re- Row Z7f-Jtws Ravbio/ R IO regard Ok e @ o0 o0 GRRen ! Photo by. RASMUSSEN, RABBI JACOB NIETO. R L mind each other that with Christmas the days begin to lengthen, The lengthening days shall longer grow Til summer rules the land. In England, where I write these words, we are especlally glad that the fathers of New England landed at Plymouth, their first home, on the shortest day In the year, and that they consecrated the new continent to Christ and his church by doing their first work on shore on Christmast day. “They builded better than they knew.” Light out of dark- ness, summer out of wiiter, days longer and years larger— such is the burden of the Christmas ode. It {s light and life and hope which ;Ive the joy to the Christmas holiday. Yes! and light and life and hope belong to Christmas when it is at the longest day of the year, quite as well as if it were the shortest. B Of the twentleth century Christmas this {s to be said or sung by poet or preacher, in Greenland or in Wilkes Land—that the world is now one world. ‘“Perfected in one,” and that with every year the union of continents and islands Is more perfect. .To take a little instance, which is a pretty one, from the moment when Green began cor- recting the longitudes of th® world by the electric tele- graph men have'known, as they did not know before, how the clock fs beating at Greenwich, though they be living themselves on an island in the Pacific or on the edge of an ice floe in Alaska. “That the world may be one,” that was the Savior's prayeér; and with every new wire laid under the ocean, with every pulse flashing unseen from mast to mast, the prayer is answered. Men may be as cynical as they choose, or as selfish as the devil would have them, but in spite of cynicism or deviltry men have to bear each other's burdens, to live each other's lives and enjoy each other's joys as they never did before. Two hundred years ago no less a person than Alexander Pope thought it a good joke to write: Ye Gods® annthilate but epace and time, And make two lovers happy. And an admiring world of readers year after year quoted his lines with a laugh as a fine burlesque on the hopes and wishes of lovers. But now space is annihilated; time is annihilated, and men and women know now that they are thelr brothers and sisters. They could not help it if they would. They would not help it if they could. The plowboy in Dakota sends her daily bread to the old Seotch widow In the Highlands, who has prayed for it to the Father of them both. The ofl which the sallor boy Sends from Alaska is sent half across the world. A pint of it Is enough for a thousand workshops, and because the boy ald his duty there off the North Cape the balance wheel of my watch is running right to-day, and the balance wheel of Jane's watch 18 running right to-day, and Jane and I meet cach other at the trysting place on Christmas morning. without the loss of a second from our Christmas kiss. Indeed, I cannot be selfish if I would. I cannot steal away and complain to the good God that he has left me alome. I cannot say that I care for nobody and nobody cares for me. New England does send ice to Caleutta. Java does send Its cinnamon for the Christmas dinner of Alaska. Alaska ‘does send its oil for John and Jane's trysting on Christmas morning, and John and Jane ought to find out on Christmas morning, as lip touches lip, and as each tries to utter first the Christmas wish—they ought to find out that we are all one living household of the living God. Dear reader, before you kindle your fire with this jour- nal, if you read in Labrador, or, before you pin up the sheet to screen the sun's rays as the} pass too hotly through the window of your house on the island of Antipodes, take to. mind on your Christmas day that we are indeed one. Find out how you can consecrate the long day or the long night to this mutual service. What are you doing, old fellow, in drawing people even closer and closer? The century has to build the four great rallway systems. First the four- track rallway from Hudson Bay to Patagonia., Second, the four-track railway from Hamburg to Kamchatka. Third, , Is it as Mary and Dorcas are at the sewing soclety? <K o in Russia, where a population immersed In crass may still be goaded on to deeds of madness an by a cunning and unserupulous priesthood. The dawn of our later civilization in enlightened Christendom lightened the miseries of the Jew and even though the sentimenmt of Christmas, “On earth peace and good will toward all men,” was rather expre barb proportion as it ssed than practiced, still the continual repetition of enti- ment served in a measure to assuage the harsh and un- warranted feeling against a people whose side of the cru- cifixion story has not yet been heard. In Germany, where & cold and refined, but nevertheless 1 do not strong and determined anti-Semitism preyails, think the advent of Christmas is very jubllamtly halled b the great mass of Jews in that country, though, indeed. few who strive after soclal preferment will assume any ex- terior that social amenities may demand. In England, where the Christmas season merely Inau- gurates a perfod of unbridled profiigacy and drunkenness for the multitudes of its populatiom, the Jew, always a temperate man, does not view the {elgl"al with dny degree of favor. He is indifferent. The lates arrivals from Rus- sia and Poland evince the greatest dread of the return of Christmas. But here in this country, where anti-Semitism is confined to the narrow minority that God and nature never intended for big thoughts or big deeds, to a coterle of egotists who doubt the sanity and integrity of all but themselves, tHe Christmastide has assumed for the Jew a new significance. Here no church fulminates anathemas that engender vi- cious thoughts in the minds of its communicants, no pastor or priest plays the role of wolf intent upon destroying the descendants of the Jewish people because a cowardly Ro- man Governor shifted the blame and the burden of his of- ficial act on to their shoulders. Here, where the absolutely sectarian character of the celebration is lost in its larger and more truly religious and humanitarian aspect, the Jew feels that he may participate with his Christian fellow- citizen In proclaiming “On earth peace and good will to- ward all men” because he, more than any other man, has made sacrifice for this same ideal He feels as did his fathers at the feast of Esther, when they sent presents to their friends and gifts to the poor, that there is afforded him another opportunity to exemplify the teachings of his own religion, and takes advantage of the occasion to dem- onstrate to his neighbors that he can enter into the spirit of his joys and if need be promote his happiness. The Jew wishes that there were more than ome occa- sion of the year when Christians turn In love to the poor, for he has full six festivals In each year that he cannot rightly observe without first providing for the poor. RSORARA NS G R OSSO A To the Christian World the railway which shall bind Europe with Syria, Babylon, AfghaniStan and Burmah. Fourth, the railway from Calro to the Cape. Are you doing your share about this? Are you writing a song about it, or are you turning a sod, or are you filing a rivet? Or without thinking of the Cape or of Beloochistam or Beled-el-Jereed, how is ti about old €aesar in the “Hallow” behind your cedars? Or is it in Antarctic “Hollow,” on the other side of a mango grove? Sarah, dear, how long is It since anybody has seen old Caesar’s people? Whatever be- came of that boy.of old Caesar’s who shipped on the Cor- morant, or that girl of his who went up to the Four Cor- ners to find a place? Sarah, dear, let us have the jinrikisha or the victoria or the buggy. and ses how old Caesar I¥ getting on. For each of us has his old Caesar, and each of us can tie up his own gartlculu knot In \!hu warp of life and each of us can throw gcross the warp the shuttle which bears the Christmas thread. And all this means that boy or girl, young man or malden, father or mother, soldler, merchant, machinist, teacher or pupil—all of us, up to the old men of four score, and their contemporaries among the old women, are to look around on Christmas day and see what we have to do for peace among the nations. Somebody, somewhere, sang Christmas morning, “Glory to God In the highest and on earth peace, good will towdard man.* Somebody, somewhere, dear reader, can and ought to’ sing this song agaln to-day—and what is more, you and I are two of those somebodies. We can do something about it. Now, pray remember, here In Typee, on the hay mow here in Auckland, or lying in a long chalr In front of the blazing log which Shicatawbut left for me three hundred years ago, you and you and I have all of us our part to take in bringing In peace among the nations. Is it a8 John and I light our pipes after the Christmas dinner? Is It as Tom speaks his plece next Saturday when the elocution day comes round?—you and I are to do our part that man. woman and child this world gver shall be truly one, that nation shall not take up arms against natlon, and that men need study war no more. PPN TT T T I ) GOROBLISHILITEGRLHR R0 | But he, her fears to cease, Sent down the meek-ey'd Peace; She, crowned with ollve green, came softly slidirg Down through the turning sphere His ready harbinger, ‘With turtle wing the amorous clouds ‘dividing; » And waving wide her myrtie wand, She strikes a universal peace through the sea and land. No war, or battle's sound ‘Was hpard the world around; The idle spear and shield were high up hung. The hooked chariot stood Unstain'd with hostile blood, ¥ The pet spake not to the armed throng. And kings sat still with awfu] eye, As it they surely knew twerr sov'relgn Lord was by, But peaceful was the night, ‘Wherein the Prince of light His relgn of peace upon earth began; The winds with wonder whist Smoothly the waters kist. ‘Whisp'ring new joys to the mild ocean, * Who niow hath quite forgot to rave, While the birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. (Copyright, 1905, by Samuel J. Tucker.) o