CHRISTMAS.
W
WEdo not believe that the 25th of December is the birthday of our Lord. We have seen abundant reasons for this, and could adduce them, if the importance of the matter required it, though we have not the works at hand now to refer to, as we think, settling the matter.
There is not an intimation of the first Christians making anything of the birthday of our Lord, observing it religiously in any way, or regarding it as a holiday, or aholy dayat all. This accounts for the uncertainty about the day. If the first Christians had observed it, or in any particular way celebrated it, as the Jews did the Passover, there never could have been any doubt about the day. Anti-christ is great onholy days, specially if, of his own appointment, or if some paganism is mixed in them. This was one source of corruption in the primitive church—the continual tendency to mix up pagan ceremonies and superstitions with the simple, pure and holy religion of our Lord. Worldly and carnal-minded men in the early ages conceived the idea ofpopularizing the religion of Christ and commending it to the world by mixing pagan ceremonies, customs and superstitions with it; adorning it with philosophy and the pagan ideas of refinement. But all this only corrupted and degraded it.
The Romish apostasy now has some fortyholy daysin a year, and as many human laws about observing them, while those involved in it gormandize, drink, revel and gamble on theLord’s day, and thus encroach upon the laws of a civilized and enlightened people. Protestants are patronizing them in this, and recognizing theirholy days, and at the same time making nothing of celebrating the sufferings of our Lord, on the first day of every week, as all history assures us was the practice of the first church! Instead of recognizing the glorious resurrection of our Lord, in the assembling on the first day of the week, they talk of theSabbath, and instead of “the communion of the blood and body of the Lord”—the commemoration of his great sufferings for us, they listen to a pitiful ditty called “a sermon,” and then put on long faces and keep Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, etc., not named in the law of God at all, but derived from paganism. If we had no other objection to sectarianism but this, we would stand clear. People who see nothing in “the first day of the week”—“the Lord’s day”—butSabbath, orrest, and see not the importance of celebrating the Lord’s death, commemorating his sufferings, in obedience to some of his last instructions, such as the injunction, “Do this till I come”—“Do this in memory of me”—need to be enlightened before they can be regarded as worshipers in any truesense, under Christ. This is the very life, the heart, the soul, and if it be left out, all is a sham, an empty pretence—nothing. The question is not about Christmas, Good Friday, nor Easter, of Romish and pagan authority, but of “the Lord’s day,” and “the communion of the blood and body of the Lord,” having the supreme and absolute authority of the Great King.