On a Christmas Eve, many years ago, before I had learned to accept Life
as it is,--as it must ever be while Man needs the discipline of
reverses, and while the ways of God are known but to Himself,--a
checquered scene, always; often grey and lowering; sometimes black with
midnight and chill with storm--on a certain Christmas Eve, then, when I
was young, unreasonable and rebellious, I took a long, lonely walk into
the country. The afternoon suited my temper, and both were gloomy. Low
heavens of clouded steel that yet seemed, now and then, to shiver with
the still, biting air, and with each shudder, to let down a few
wandering flakes of snow; a bleak landscape of commons, blasted by
invisible frost; of sterile hills, that must have been stony and bare in
the sunniest springtime,--and for a horizon, a girdle of leafless woods,
stretching up motionless boughs against the pitiless sky; in the hollow
formed by the amphitheatre of hills, an artificial pond--too intensely
tame in form and surroundings to deserve the name of lake, or be
mistaken for aught but what it was, viz., a pool dug and filled with a
single eye to the production of ice for the next summer’s use,--this was
the picture that greeted my outlooking sight. Within was the dull, icy
calm of stoical misanthropy; distrust of my fellows, which stubbornly
refused to ask of heavenly wisdom the solution of the human enigma that
had baffled, in disgusting me.
Into the midst of this sunless mood came a surprise Right before me, in
my steady but aimless track across the waste, was a clump of dwarf
trees, poor, puny things that must have had a hard coming-up. I
marvelled, in surveying them, that the germs from which they had
struggled had had the courage to sprout in such a barren spot. In the
centre of the coppice, head and shoulders above his fellows, arose a
holly sapling, brave with leaves of glossy green and scarlet berries.
The only smile in the drear expanse, it was in itself a whole fountain
of cheer. The soil about the trunk might be frozen to stone-like
hardness, but below, the great heart of Mother Earth pulsed warmly
still; throwing up, at each beat, sap into the hardy frame of her
winter-child; strength to the lusty limbs; verdure to the spiky leaves;
blushes to the coral beads. And while I looked, a bevy of brown-coated
plump-breasted snow-birds whirled noisily across the plain, and
alighted, with much twittering and a deal of happy, useless fluttering,
among the inviting branches.
I had conned my lesson, and I turned my face homewards with changed
spirits and a changed purpose. As one measure towards the fulfilment of
the latter, I send this Christmas greeting into the waste we know as the
common life of this working-day world. We make it too common, dear
reader. We choose for ourselves a path across a dead level, and then
perversely adapt our feelings to what we are pleased to call our
circumstances. I pray you, for this one holiday season, learn with me of
my holly-tree. Seek out present brightness, and in it read the promise
of happy days to come. Sigh not that
--“All hope of Spring-time
Has perished with the year,”
while the same Love that nourishes the tiny greenling of the forest into
brightness and beauty, despite wintry blast and wintry sleet, will keep
alive in your heart, if not the tender shoots of youthful joys, the
stronger, braver, worthier growth of love for your brother man; helpful
charity for all things weak and lowly and sorrowing; hope and faith in
the wise and tender Father of us all.