We do 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 a _holy day_ at 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 on _holy 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 of
popularizing 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 forty _holy days_ in a year, and
as many human laws about observing them, while those involved in
it gormandize, drink, revel and gamble on the _Lord’s day_, and
thus encroach upon the laws of a civilized and enlightened people.
Protestants are patronizing them in this, and recognizing their
_holy 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 the _Sabbath_, 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”—but _Sabbath_, or _rest_, 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 true
sense, 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.