Christmas Queries

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 23, 1872

Christmas Queries.

With every returning Christmas, with every ending year, there comes the thought, What have these years, each one celebrating at its close the birth of Light into the world, these Christian years, lit up in all their course by the radiance from Calvary, what have they left to the world of actual, universal good? Is the world better or worse since the star of Bethlehem shone for the ages? Are the later centuries higher up than the earlier? In what is the nineteenth ahead of the first? Is it anything more than a self-complacent pride in that which is our own that gives the brighter flame and the purer odor to the incense of the present? To be sure, we have the Laureate’s word that “thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,” but just what this “purpose,” with its commendable perseverance means, no one but the Laureate knows. To be sure, within less then a century electricity and steam have annihilated distance and made the whole world neighbors. Italy and France shake hands under the mountains, Europe and America hold tete-a-tetes under the waves. But have all the triumphs of science made the world as a whole any better, any wiser, any purer and happier? Is truth any the more the property of the masses? Have ignorance and crime and poverty any the narrower range? In the mad race for power and wealth are men any the less unscrupulous? Has political honesty come to be any the less a contradiction of terms? Is war, with death in its course and suffering in its train, any the less frequent or horrible? Is drunkenness, with its wrecked lives, blighted homes, any the rarer? Does Poverty hold wide open the doors of Crime to fewer starving and freezing children? Are gallows and prison and morgue any the less necessities of society?

If to these questions there comes in reply from every land a mournful negative, of what avail are developed civilizations, perfected governments and ripened sciences? The improved military system of Prussia makes her all the more ready to accept the challenge, involving in its consequences the slaughter of thousands and the laying waste of a nation. The ever-increasing looms of New England furnish scope for grinding out health and hope for the lives of so many more factory children. The building-up of large cities, by an increase of population, offers so much the wider harvests for the sickle of Pestilence.

Is the earth, with all its new developments and improvements, really moving further and further away from the millennial years? Is the golden age behind us and not before? Are the generations attesting, and the eternities waiting sadly to prove, that the evil in man is stronger than the good, and destined ultimately to triumph? Have the light and the love which for thirty-three years walked the earth, for its good, from Bethlehem to Golgotha, been wasting themselves along the path of nineteen centuries? Has the angelic song of “Peace on earth, good will to men” proved only a dream of the night, a beautiful unfulfilled prophecy? If indeed so, if every dying year carries something of the good with it into a sepulchre from which the stone is never rolled away, and upon which no resurrection morning breaks, what hope is there in the unborn years to come? No hope, if it were not that above all speculation, above all experience, there are a belief and a trust, that somehow in the eternal plan, somewhere in the great universe, sometime in the endless future, the true and the good, so surely as God reigns, are to triumph.—Palladium.