Christmas! How it echoes in our hearts! How it whispers round the world! We know its meaning and feel its power only in the stillness and depth of spiritual sense. Science, not sentiment, discerns the substance of Christmas. The din of materialism, the shallowness of sense, the darkness of doubt cannot silence its message, nor can pressure and pride, frivolity and friction, festivity and fatigue, extinguish its light.
Christmas is evolved of Spirit and must be spiritually understood. It signifies the ever-present revelation of Life and Love, of man's oneness with God, and of the continuity of being. In a beautiful chapter entitled "Christmas" in her book "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany," Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 260), "In Christian Science, Christmas stands for the real, the absolute and eternal,—for the things of Spirit, not of matter."
From ancient time the eternal Christ has illumined the world. Like a golden thread, there runs throughout the Old Testament with increasing brilliance the promise of the Messiah, or Christ, who should come to Israel and save mankind. Isaiah's vibrant prophecy proclaims (Isa. 7:14), "The Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel [in the Hebrew, 'God with us']." Again (Isa. 9:6, 7): "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever." Here is visioned in full glory the Christ, the revelation of divine Science, even the absolute oneness of Principle and its idea, wherein the idea has no substance or entity of its own but exists as the eternal evidence of "The mighty God, The everlasting Father," which constitutes the idea "The Prince of Peace." Here it is further declared that the idea, or revelation of divine Science, shall rule all nations and peoples.
