AS the result of custom, education, tradition, men are apt, unthinkingly, to take many things as they find them, until they begin to reach out for the actual significance of thoughts and actions which have so largely shaped their lives. Human memories, often superstitious and sentimental, the desire to gratify and to be gratified, what flimsy and transient structures they build, how little it takes to strip them of their interest and their joy! Yet to many the festival of Christmas has meant little more than this, accompanied often by a great weariness, that materiality should make such heavy demands upon their exchequer and their time.
For him who understands the meaning of Christmas to the human race, the subjective import to each individual of the birth of the Christ-idea, those things which merely make for pleasure-seeking and feasting must become an imposition and a farce. He who no longer looks on at events and influences as factors which may shape his life without his volition or understanding of their purpose, knows that the spiritual significance of Christmas alone is essential to his happiness, enlightenment, and salvation.
"In Christian Science, Christmas stands for the real, the absolute and eternal,—for the things of Spirit, not of matter," writes Mary Baker Eddy on page 260 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany." That which Christian Scientists commemorate on Christmas Day is the appearing to consciousness of the highest human concept of the Christ, dating the Christian era. They know that he who declared of himself, "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father," saw the phenomena of material birth and death as merely temporary and insubstantial. To commemorate Christmas, the Christian Scientist seeks to understand and therefore to demonstrate the new birth, or the unfoldment of Spirit, in his own life, that which must mean a forever unfolding of the divine idea.
