NO ROOM
There is an old Gaelic proverb that says: 'Where there is heart-room
there also is house-room.' There was room enough in that mean inn for
the farmers with their pouches filled with money for the tax, for the
soldiers that swaggered with the pride of empire, for the
village-talebearers with their rude jests; but for a poor woman in the
hour of her need there was no room. She was shut out because there was
not found in that inn any with heart big enough to make room for her.
What was she anyway?--a mere chattel; and what her child?--already
there were too many children; and the only course to adopt was to let
most of them die! And so at its dawn we can see what a mighty change
Christianity has made in the world. Though the mother and the Child
were shut out of the inn and consigned to the asses' stall, yet because
of that mother and Child womanhood is to-day honoured and childhood
most precious. To-day, in whatever land on which the shadow of the
Cross has fallen, there is heart-room and house-room for mother and
child.
I
As one reads the old beautiful story, this foot-note that explains how
the Founder of Christianity was born in a stable because 'there was no
room for them in the inn' stirs the mind with a wistful poignancy. The
book slips down on the knees and the imagination awakes. The essence
of nineteen centuries of Christian history is here. The web of all the
centuries is woven after the one pattern. Shut out at His birth, His
fate has been the same ever since. He came with the message of
humanity's renewal. He proclaimed the most revolutionary doctrine ever
preached to men--that the pariahs of humanity, publicans, sinners,
slaves, those ignorant of the law and therefore accursed, were all the
sons of God; and that only one law was requisite, that men should love
one another with a love that gleamed red with sacrificial blood. But
what have men done with this evangel? They have shut it out! It was
too beautiful for their gross hearts and their self-clouded eyes. It
was also very difficult. It required the changed heart and the
transfigured life. And that has always been most difficult--to
transmute the self-centred into the God-centred and all it means. So
men set themselves to circumvent that demand for the surrendered
heart--and they offered the surrendered brain. That is quite easy.
They formulated logical propositions setting forth that thus and thus
God acted, and they said--'Believe this and be saved, or disbelieve and
be damned!' Christianity that came into the world as spirit and life
became mere intellectual gymnastics! And with the name of the Lord of
Love on their lips Christians cheerfully burnt each other because their
definitions differed.... What an amazing fate to overtake the most
beautiful thing that ever was seen on the earth! ... A Borgia sits on
the throne of St. Peter; Calvin burns Servetus; the Jesuit exterminates
his opponents; the Covenanter proclaims that he prefers to die than to
live and see 'this intolerable toleration'; and all the time the Lord
Jesus Christ is shut out. Not wholly shut out, however, for He has in
every age found a shelter and a welcome in the stables and the sheds,
among the ragged, the mean, and the outcasts of humanity.
II
It is not only in the great organisations that bear His name that there
has often been found no room for the Christ; but still less has there
been found room for Him in the social order. This great revolutionary
identifies Himself so closely with humanity, that He declares that
whosoever receives a little child and loves it receives and loves Him.
How then do we deal with the Founder of Christianity as He comes to us
in the form of a little child, saying, 'Receive Me'? ... This is the
way we deal with Him. Every five minutes of the day a baby dies
somewhere in the United Kingdom. There are districts in great cities
where two hundred out of one thousand perish in the first year of life.
A third of the possible population die in the years of childhood. The
horrors of war are small compared to the horrors of peace, to which we
have become so inured that we scarce notice them. We have taken the
sunshine and the fresh air and the starlight from millions of our
fellow citizens and shut them up in barracks and surrounded them with
forces of degeneration, and have provided them a narcotic for their
misery, so that womanhood becomes degraded and childhood pines and
dies. Still, after nineteen centuries, Jesus Christ is shut out from
the social order we have laboriously created. And we celebrate
Christmas Day without so much as a sense of incongruity between our
beliefs and our actions.
II
One of the weirdest symptoms of decay in our day is the way the whole
social system seems to have conspired to shut out the child. In the
last years property-owners had one condition that was unaltered: they
would not let their houses to tenants with children. 'How many
children and how old are they?' was the deciding question that always
shut the door. The coming of a baby was often the signal that brought
an ejectment warrant. The penalty for bringing a child into the world
was being thrown into the street. The men who filled the inn at
Bethlehem with mirth nineteen centuries ago have had a mighty multitude
who shared their spirit. Rents have been to them more to be desired
than babies.
Here is an advertisement that appeared in the _Daily Chronicle_ of 29th
May 1917: 'Chapel-keepers, man and wife (no children), for large
Congregational church, Central London; must be total abstainers ... 5
rooms, coal and light provided.--Write ------, hon. secretary, ... E.C.
4.' I forbear giving the name of the Christian church that provides
five rooms for its 'keeper' and slams the door in the face of the
child. (The curious can find it in the files.) Even in this day, when
the child is so precious to the race, one can see unblushing
advertisements for gardeners and lodge-keepers with the clause 'no
children.' That the children of this world should act so is
deplorable; but that the children of the light should have 'five
rooms,' and in them all no place for a cradle--that suggests doom.
Think of that congregation hailing, with songs of rapture, the coming
of the Child; the preacher getting dewy over the callousness of the inn
in Bethlehem--and their own servants forbidden a child! ... It was
something like that which caused a prophet of old to exclaim--'Judgment
begins in the House of God.'
IV
At this Christmastide what we need most is to make room for the Child.
People are ever ready to make room for that which they recognise to be
precious. The most precious thing on earth is goodness. Give any
mother her choice of her son being rich and a rogue, or poor and good;
she will choose poverty. There is no power that builds up men and
women in unselfishness and goodness but the power that is radiated from
Him whose life on earth began in a manger. We must, if need be, cast
away our costliest treasures that we may make room.... In very truth
He cannot now be shut out altogether. No contumely will drive Him
hence. It is different now from the day when a woman groped her way in
agony to the asses and the stall. Different now, for He comes in
through the closed doors. That is how the world has not been able to
destroy Christianity; and that is how the Child conquers at the last.