CHR ISTM AS he coming of Christinas brings along with it nowadays - as never before a flock of fellow-travelers to which most Bible believers may have become resigned but with which they by no means can be sympathetic. The scandal ous commercialization of our Lord’s birth gets under way by late summer. By Thanksgiving it has been stepped up for the deafening crescendo that increases by the day until frantic shoppers are completely buried under an avalanche of sales talk. Reminded by the hour how many shopping days they have left, they drive their exhausted frames to make the deadline with that exchangeable tie for somebody they had forgotten who remembered them last year. Come Christmas and a nation of nervous wrecks whose minds have been in stores for weeks are in poor condition to warm their hearts in church. Santa Claus starts coming to town earlier every year and whereunto this mania will grow we dare not prophesy. Smothered as it is in buying and selling, the true meaning of Christmas suffers not only from COMMER CIALISM but is almost hopelessly lost in PAGANISM. Any informed person knows that the early church did not celebrate Christmas. Our Lord never said anything about commemorating His birth. He asked us to remem ber His death and we do this in the Lord’s Supper. Christmas as a religious festival probably got started after the “ conversion” of Constantine, that calamity, from which we have never recovered. Multitudes of heathen professed to become Christians and joined the church. Along with them they brought the luggage of their old life including most of the paraphernalia with which we observe Christmas. Of course we all know that we have to go far afield from the New Testament to find Santa Claus, Christmas trees, Yule logs, lighted tapers and other pagan trappings. The secular world today brazenly cele brates Christmas without Christ and even the church loses Him often in a jungle of heathenism which it inherited from the ungodly. We paid dearly for what Constantine brought us and nothing cost us more than when we borrowed from the devil the stage setting in which to celebrate the birth of our Lord. Even when we get around to the star of Bethlehem, the shepherds, the Magi, and the manger, we sometimes miss the point in what amounts to mere SENTIMENTAL ISM. Witness the strange sermons about peace on earth, good will to men. Jesus who came to teach us brother hood, Jesus the Example, Jesus whose teachings in the Sermon on the Mount answers all our problems — thus far they get and no farther. But if that is all His birth brought to us, we are of all men most miserable. When-
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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