p. 15 | A NATIONAL MOCKERY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jan 16, 1907

"A NATIONAL MOCKERY."

According to the New York "World" there were on Christmas twenty-six killings in three States only—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The names of all are given. Most of these were the result in some way of Christmas dissipation. There was much property loss besides, and many injured who will not die. The twenty-six does not include the eleven killed in the race riots at Jackson, Miss. This sort of Christmas observance was quite general. The Atlanta "Constitution" calls the Christmas celebration "A National Mockery," and continues:

"The newspapers issued on the day after Christmas, throout America, are calendars of crime. It seems as tho in brutal mockery of the anniversary of the birth of Christ, humanity in this country lets loose on Christmas Day its vilest passions. Run over the papers published from the gulf to the great lakes and Maine to California, and, without an exception, if they print the news, they chronicle in multiple form the violation of every law in the moral and legal code. "Murder, riot, robbery, arson, assault, drunkenness! "That is the horrible satirical procession, stalking annually before the eyes of a nation hypothetically devoted to law and order, giving at least a nominal allegiance to the Christian religion. It is the paradoxical spectacle of a Christian people making the holiest religious festival in the year the gruesome climax to a ten-day saturnalia of outlawry and debauchery that shames the annals of the decadent Roman Empire in its most revolting phases."

What a denial such a record gives to the "Christian nation" idea! "Christian nation," forsooth! What a lesson it ought to be to Christians in this respect: That any heathen festival, adopted by a backslidden and apostate Christianity can never become Christian. The whole Yule-tide season is distinctly pagan in pedigree and persistence. The old Roman Saturnalia is the basis for our Christmas feasting, gormandizing, gluttony. "Christmas" has no Biblical basis, no basis in fact. Christ was not then born; nor does the Bible ask any recognition of His birth from us, only as it affects the whole man every day. Sunday is a parallel to Christmas. Men are prone to observe Sunday as their pagan ancestors observed it, in pleasure. Men are vainly trying to enforce a sacredness the day never possessed, by law. We shall soon find plenty of "reformers" who are anxious to compel the "sacred observance of the climax of the Saturnalia, called Christmas, in the same way. "Every plant which My heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up." Christmas of any kind is not of God's planting.