As Christmas time draws near, the cherished impulses of every Christian heart lead thought away to Bethlehem of Judæa, and we rehearse again, with an ever new delight, the incidents of the world's sweetest story. It is well if our pilgrimage must needs be one in thought only, for a personal visit to the hallowed place brings keen disappointment as well as great satisfaction, and quite as much of pain perchance, as of pleasure. The old time simplicity and naturalness, the traditional atmosphere of the story's setting, is now conspicuously absent. The sky is indeed fair as of yore, and the rounded hills that echoed the angels" song fall away in unmarred grace and with the same inviting pastures between, but the "Little Town" is cramped and unkempt, and in the festal season its streets and marketplace are crowded with a motley assemblage which appeals no less strongly to our sense of pity, than to our sense of the picturesque.
When we reach the grotto of the nativity we find its soldier-guarded shrine invested with a tawdry embellishment which offends at every point, and saddens one with the discovery of the pettiness, the pathetic credulity of those who blindly yield themselves to superstitious reverence. And when we would escape to the fields we are met ever and anon with the plaintive leper cry, "Unclean Unclean revealing the grievous fact that even these in Bethlehem, have not yet found the Christ child.
It is well, and we are glad that the babe is honored in the world's cathedrals and confessions, in ritual and in song, but the representative wretchedness and mendicancy at Bethlehem's gate turn our thought away from the exterior, the symbolic and the suggestive, to the deeper spiritual meaning of the event itself, the dawn of the Christ life in the cloisters of a sincere and humble heart.
