People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 27-25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1896 — CHRISTMASISMS. [ARTICLE]

CHRISTMASISMS.

Junius Henri Browne’s Helps to Digest the Dinner. Although Christmas comes but once a year, we need not wait till Christmas for an opportunity to do good. Wo can make a Christmas for the poor and unfortunate whenever our hearts are touched with pity and our hands tingle with generosity. There are persons who do not so much censure Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus as for betraying him for so small a sum (30 pieces of silver, valued at $22), when he might have got a much larger one. Their horror of the crime is forgotten in the moagerness of the payment. Judas betrayed his Master with a kiss. Many a man nowadays betrays his mistress in the same way, but has not, like the faithless apostle, compunction of conscience afterward to go and hang himself. It is generally believed now by biblical scholars that Judas was not a vulgar traitor, as indeed his tragic end proves, but that he betrayed Jesus in order to compel him, in sheer self defense, to proclaim himself Messiah, the expected deliverer and king, and to overcomo his fate by his supernatural power. His fellow disciples had the same faith and expectations, but did not act on them. Thus Judas would seem to have had simply the courage of his convictions, for which men are, in these days, so highly commended. The best sauce for a Christmas dinner is a good conscience, and the finest dessert is the memory of kind acts done in honor of the day.

Tho host test of the excellence, the nobleness, the beauty of tho life of Jesus, is that no man, however skeptical about theologic tenets, however doubtful of the truth of revelation, has ever criticised or sought to disparago tho completeness of his character, the perfection of his nature. Thousands of persons who call themselves Christians have so far departed from the precepts and practices of Christ that tho true Christianswould be justified in taking tho name Jesusitcs. The widest toleration in religious or theological matters, toward which tho churches aro steadily striving, but which they have not yet compassed, may be learned from the words and acts of Jesus. Many a man who has been and is denounced as a unpardonable blasphemer, an enemy of all religion, would bo acceptable in the eyes of the good Jesus. Tho best way to celebrate Christinas is to practice self denial, to assist tho needy, to succor the distressed, to chase away little tears with joyous smiles. If we can bring on Christmas, or on any other day, sympathy and love, along with food, to the hungry, or raiment to the naked, we work the same kind of miracle that Jesus wrought in Galilee when ho fed 5,000 persons with five loaves and two small fishes.

When Jesus, at the pool of Bothesda, healed on Sunday tho poor man of a lifelong affliction ho gave a powerful rebuke to Sabbatarianism, to all hypocrisy, especially to tho holier than thou assumptions so characteristic of tho Pharisees of the present, no less than of the past. In pronouncing judgment on tho woman taken in adultery, Jesus showed how infinitely ho preferred religion to theology, which depends on dogma, while religion depends on charity. Junius Henri Browne.