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The Children’s Christmas Trayer
WAS Christmas eve, and the Christmas
glow
Filled all the house with cheer.
The happy, longed-for night had come,
The best of all the year.
The merry children laugh and dance
And shout in childish glee
At sound of Santa’s jingling bells;
But when the Christmas tree
T
Bursts full upon their wondering sight,
Such joy each breast doth fill,
That every busy little tongue
Is for a moment still.
Then sweetly on the Christmas air,
Is swiftly borne along
From every happy little heart,
The children’s Christmas song.
“Heavily hung is our Christmas tree.
’Tis loaded well for you and me.
The hemlock branches, piled with snow,
In shady wood, bend not so low.
The leaves are dead; the birds have fled;
And little brooks’ tongues are tied with cold;
But bells may ring; and children sing,
For safe is our dear Shepherd’s fold. ’ ’
But just outside the warmth and glow,
A form, so young and slight,
Is shivering in the wind and snow
Os a drear December night.
For her there is no Christmas cheer;
With hungry, longing eyes,
She gazes on the scene within.
“0, God in heaven,” she cries,
“Please let me feel, for just one night,
How it would seem to be
Somebody’s little girl, and have
One really Christmas tree!”
Then, from within, she hears again
The voices, sweet and clear,
Os children, who have never known
The cold and hunger fear.
“Help us, dear Lord, lest we selfish be;
All hearts are not so glad as we;
The Value of a Shake- Up
The Sunday School Times of recent date
gives us this splendid, soul-stirring article thaj; we
feel ought to be passed on and given special promi
nence, so pregnant is it with possible good:
GOOD, big shake-up, every now and
then, is like a tonic. Police captains
find that, if they change every man
around to a different position about
once in so often, it is good for the en
tire force. The managers of some busi
ness offices say that a jarring is benefi-
I cial to almost everybody, and especially
' for those in danger of believing that
IS]
JJi
they are indispensable. It is a most remarkable boy
who is not improved, on occasions, by a genuine
“calling down. ,,
Even nature seems to have provided that a shake
up should have its regular place in the arrangement
of things. The beach gets dirty and cut up, and
along comes a good northeaster and clears it again.
Earthquakes are credited with bringing islands out
of the sea, and with helping in the formation of
mountain ranges. A big windstorm will bring down
trees with worn out trunks, and prune off dead
branches. And many a man will confess that a
sound thrashing at the hands of some other lad in
the days of his youth was the beginning of his moral
development; that, after the ache was over, it set
him to thinking. Nature abhors monotony almost
as much as a vacuum, and seems to have provided
that at various times a general shaking up is neces
sary to maintain the proper standard.
Remember, then, Thy poor tonight,
And shroud their darkness wdth Thy light.
The hungry feed; the wand’rer lead;
The sorrowing soothe; the captive free.;
Then help, we pray, on this glad day,
All those who have no Christmas tree.”
And surely ’twas God’s messenger,
In answer, swift, to prayer,
That caused a tiny maid to turn
And see one standing there,
With face close pressed against the pane,
So friendless and alone,
To whom the joys of home, sweet home,
And Christmas were unknown.
“0 papa,” lisped the little one,
“I fink Dod’s heard our prayer
And sent His very poorest poor —
She standin’ wight out there!
“I fink He sent her here betause
He knows you’re kind and dood,
And wouldn’t drive His poor away,
Like some bad papas would.”
Then opens wide the great hall-door;
And from the cold and night
They bring God’s trembling little one
Into the warmth and light.
And never more shall she go out,
All friendless and alone;
For evermore shall this child be
As is their very own.
Then, once again, with Christmas joy,
Their happy voices ring;
And hers, no longer choked with sobs,
Now joins them as they sing:
“Merrily, merrily, sing we all;
On Christmas Eve the shadows fall.
On Christmas morn the sunlight breaks,
And all the world to gladness wakes.
God giveth all; the ravens call,
He heareth them, so let us begin.
He hears alway, when children pray,
For He, Himself, a child has been.”
Fitzgerald, Ga. MRS. A. B. WADE.
SS) ffig) Sg)
All of which ought to remind us that our turn
may come at any time. Yet few of us want to be
the center of any such rough experiences. We pre
fer to arrange things to suit our taste, and then to
keep them so. A genuine shake-up that dislodges
us we view as a calamity; we dread its coming,
and we mourn its effect.
This feeling is of a piece with the tendency we
have to fancy that our own idea of things is inva
riably correct. A really radical change of opinion,
especially our opinion of ourself, is little less than
painful. When a shake-up comes that reverses a
man’s opinion of himself it is almost as serious as
burning down his house. You w T ould not have to
hunt long on any street to find men whom you could
persuade to put their household furniture into the
street more quickly than you could get them to
throw over their opinions of themselves. We are
all conservatives on moral questions, when the ques
tions concern ourselves, with a conservatism that is
better called stubbornness, and that nothing short
of force will alter. It is not surprising, therefore,
that in dealing with us God makes occasional use
of a moral shake-up.
Now a brand new idea is one of earth’s treasures,
and the great value of a crisis is that it can give
us a new view point. Since we are not perfect, it
easily follows that the set of ideas with which we
are equipped at any given time is imperfect. God’s
fixed purpose is to move us toward perfection, and
to do that he must see to it that we r 0 rid of
The Golden Age for December 24, 1908.
the defective ideas and adopt new ones. If he
can get us to accept the new ones quietly, well and
good; but if we are stubborn, then he will use
stronger means to get the new idea into us. The
Old Testament is a collection of records of the
steps by which our moral forebears learned what God
would have them know. It was a slow process;
some men, such as Saul, never learned it, and per
ished rather than surrender the idea that they
were supreme over their own destinies; other men
submitted after they had been nearly shaken to
pieces, like Elijah; and others, like Daniel, seem to
have required very little more than a word.
God seems to have a system for moral develop
ment. the stages of it being represented in the seven
“blesseds” of the beatitudes. Beginning with the
first, “poor in spirit,” which means the surrender
of my will to God’s, each beatitude marks a step
upward in spiritual development, and it seems to be
his purpose to lend us np just as fast ns we can 2:0.
Every one of those beatitudes is an intellectual and
moral acquisition, and if a shake-up will help us to
get it, God will probably send us such a crisis.
A failure in business has taught many a self
willed man that the directing hand of his life was
God’s and not his own, and has been the means of
teaching him the truth of the first beatitude. The
violent and sudden retribution for what seemed a
trivial sin, a retribution apparently away out of pro
portion to the offense, has tairnht many of us that
every sin, no matter how small, is deadly, and has
caused us to strive to become pure, or single, in
heart. Few lives have escaped some swift and
awful fall before an unsuspected temptation, and
we who have always thought that we were morally
spotless have suddenly awakened to find ourselves
struggling in the mire along with those whom we
have hitherto despised. God does not tempt any
man with evil, but he sometimes humbles our pride
by teaching us that we are no better than anv other
sinner, and that confidence in ourselves will bring
the strongest of us to a bad fall.
And of all the shake-ups that come, there is scarce
any that is so terrific as this sudden recognition
that we are sinners, and almost criminals. It goes
to the very root of our self-esteem. It cuts to the
quick, and makes the very foundations to tremble,
and —it gives us an entirely new estimate of our
selves. Just such an experience can be the birth
day of a new spiritual life, if in that fearful hour
we seek God and do not flee from him. There is an
operation in surgery when an organ has gotten de
tached; the only way for it to be kept in place is
to cut it, and cut the near-by muscles, and then sew
the two wounds together. In process of healing, the
organ grows fast to its support. The surest way
for a heart to grow fast to Christ is to bring its
own bleeding side to the side of the Christ who was
wounded for it, and the two will become one.
It is a good thing for every Christian to assure
himself repeatedly that there is a reason for every
thing that happens. In the midst of what seems to
be plain sailing, we come to sudden wreck, we are
stricken down with sickness, or the promised co
operation of others is suddenly withdrawn; and as
we look at the debris of our work we say plaintively
that we cannot see why this should have been vis
ited on us when our motives were so good. But
there was a reason, and it is not always that we
were to blame. Let us take it as one of our shake
ups, and try to find what God meant us to learn by
it. Men who make a business of writing sometimes
leave their desks and go for a long trip, traveling
as long as they can. Meanwhile they are produc
ing nothing. But when they take up their pens
again they are far ahead of the point at which
they laid them down. The interruption of their
work has given them a new set of ideas
A shake-up is good for us, not is. It is a
shame for a man to come out of a Wg sickness and
not be stronger at hear* It is a pity to waste a
temptation or a misfor,_ ( ... they are the most val
uable things thri v. evt got, for they conceal new
ideas, and ' ;sibly can lift us to new beatitudes.
Them wide angle between God’s viewpoint and
ours, f j, tis God’s intention that these shall grow
closer closer together. It is cur privilege, each
time we are shaken from the old position, to find a
new one a little nearer to God.
