THE MORAL LAW
he center of attraction of the world at Christmas time is a stable---and in the stable a manger, and in the manger a new-born Child. Ordinarily great heroes are venerated as they were at the height of their career, or, in the case of soldiers who die on the battlefield, as they were at the moment of magnificent death. But of all those who have won and held the admiration of mankind, there is only One Who is commemorated as an infant in swaddling clothes. We have all seen representations, painted on canvas, or sculptured in marble or bronze, of the young commander Napoleon leading the assault on foot at the bridge of Lodi or astride a beautiful white charger winning his spectacular victory at Austerlitz or Jena. There are paintings galore of the Duke of Wellington at the moment of his supreme triumph,---Napoleon's supreme disaster, Waterloo. There is a noble play of Shakespeare's that makes us see and realize much better than the cold unimaginative annals of mere history the tragedy of the death of Julius Caesar, "E'en at the base of Pompey's statue which all the while ran blood."
Yes, there are paintings and sculptures and tapestries and poems and plays and volumes of brilliant literature about great men winning battles, addressing parliaments, signing Declarations of Independence, wresting Magna Charta from a reluctant king, or on the other hand losing a great cause magnificently and dramatically, making one last heroic gesture like Robert Emmet in the prisoner's dock, or Blessed Thomas More on the scaffold, or St. Joan of Arc in the midst of the flames, or the heroes of the Easter uprising facing a firing squad.
But there is only one hero, and He the greatest of all, who gathers His admirers and His adorers around His cradle. "I, if I be lifted up," said Jesus, "will draw all men unto Me." And He does, indeed, draw them to His cross. But I wonder if it be not even a more surprising miracle to draw men to a cradle than to a cross. At any rate the wide world today is in spirit at the crib of Bethlehem. Jesus has power to attract us to a stable at the end of a dirty oriental lane, to a hole in the rock filled with peasants, herders of sheep and other poor people.
And here is the miracle of Christmas---a moral and spiritual miracle; a world that admires force and power, drawn to pure helplessness; a world that worships wealth, venerating poverty; a world that ordinarily genuflects only to social standing, noble blood, great fortune, or to intellectual and artistic distinction, putting away for a few days at least its pride and snobbery and foolishness; a world suddenly become human in loving contemplation of a baby lying on an improvised pallet of straw in a stable.
Christian faith, evidently, is a great leveler of class and of social distinctions. In the Catholic Church we indulge a certain lawful, pride in the fact that we are the church of the poor. The rich who worship with us must be resigned to touch elbows with day laborers, servants, small tradesmen, mechanics. In the long lines of penitents waiting their turn at the confessional, and in the great swarms that come to the Communion rail, the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, the highly cultured and the uncouth meet in the sublime equality of Christian democracy. And so it was in Bethlehem: peasants and kings, rustics and Magi met at the crib of the Babe Jesus.
Now, therefore, of all the endless thoughts that come to the mind at Christmas-time, I select this idea to be emphasized: the leveling of social and intellectual barriers, and the abolition of all other artificial and anti-Christian discrimination among the worshippers who throng the court of the Babe of Bethlehem;---the court that was held in a stable, with peasants in place of princes, with the ass and the ox in place of liveried attendants, with straw scattered over a floor of hardened earth in place of soft rugs upon marble, and with a little Baby in swaddling garments in place of a king clad in ermine, sceptre in hand and crown on head.
Of all who gathered in that strange throne room to reverence that strange king, the shepherds and the Magi will serve as symbols of the extremes that still meet after all these centuries to do honor and to offer love to Jesus, Son of God and son of Mary.
Perhaps there is a tendency in the mind of pious Christians to idealize those Palestinian peasants. But there is no reason to suppose that they were different from any other herders of sheep and of cattle-in Judea---or in any other part of the Orient.
I believe it is the common experience of travelers to the Holy Land to be disappointed---if not scandalized---because the actual peasants in that part of the world do not resemble the peasants that we see in art. The shepherds of Corregio, Botticelli and perhaps especially of Fra Angelico, not to mention the rest of the army of artists who have painted the Nativity, are idealized, spiritualized shepherds, the like of which have never been, East or West, in ancient times or nowadays. They bear the same resemblance to real peasants as a gentleman farmer bears to what is called, I believe, a "dirt farmer." The peasants who gathered at the crib of Jesus were "dirt" farmers (as was perhaps too obvious), and herders who came into actual contact with cattle (as was also very obvious). The peasants you see in Palestine today would be a good sample of those of Jesus' day. Manners and habits and costumes don't change in the Orient. Those who have not traveled to the Holy Land may perhaps have seen a motion picture "Grass" taken a few years ago. The cattlemen in that picture might just as well have been of Abraham's day or Christ's. And they were not picturesque. Or at least they were not pretty. Neither were the shepherds who came to the cave of Jesus and stood about in their awkward, ernbarrassed way; they were unkempt, unwashed, illiterate, uncouth, and if the full truth be told, they were probably no more pious or virtuous than it behooved them to be.
I dare say that in Palestine in King Herod's day the peasant was much like the French tiller of the soil, painted by Millet and described in rhetorical verse by Edwin Markham:
"Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face
And on his back the burden of the world."
The poem continues with perhaps an exaggerated choice of epithets to describe the peasant as one---
"Dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes
Stolid and stunned. a brother to the ox."
Whether there was in Millet's day or Markham's, any French peasant of whom it might be said that he was "dead to rapture and despair," and whether in truth and justice, he could be called "a thing that grieves not and that never hopes" is a debatable question, to say the least. Millet's man with the hoe was kin to the man and woman of the Angelus. He was no brother to the ox, because he knew religion; he had faith, and where there is faith there is hope. Of course he wore a dirty smock and wooden shoes caked with mud, but he went to Mass on Sunday, he received Holy Communion perhaps side by side with the grand seigneur and the chatelaine from the mansion close by, and if you could see him as he went back to his place with the Sacred Host upon his tongue I venture to think you would have seen some slight trace of rapture on his face. Besides, at Christmas time in his own home he had a tiny imitation of the creche of Bethlehem, and in the parish church there was a much more gorgeous one with life-size figures of the Babe and His Mother, and St. Joseph and the kings and shepherds. And, just as likely as not, when he went to make his simple prayers at that wonderful Christmas crib he found himself again side by side with the grand seigneur and the chatelaine and I am sure that he realized in his humble way that history was repeating itself; that he was like the shepherds at the original crib and his rich neighbors were like the Magi.
But we may admit, no doubt, that in ancient Palestine conditions were worse than in modern France. The peasants who gathered about Jesus were quite innocent of intellectual activity, and their spiritual development was probably small. Their morals, let us hope were decent, as the morals of simple people have always been. They were "poor people" indeed, but not as Markham, the poet, has imagined poor people, and not, I may add, "poor people" like the desperate souls discovered or imagined by Dostoievski. They were poor, simple, guileless, but it is impossible to believe that they could have been totally ignorant of the promise of the Messiah, and it is probable, to say the least, that they knew if only by the angels' song that the long expected Deliverer was now come and that He would wash away their sins and in the end fulfill their hope for rest and peace in paradise.
At the other extreme of those who came to see the new born Babe in the Stable of Bethlehem were the Magi. Now we cannot claim to know much about these mysterious "wise men." Legend has made them kings as well as philosophers, saints as well as scholars. Perhaps we are safe in supposing that they were acquainted with whatever learning was current in Egypt and Babylon, and whatever wisdom there was in India or in the not very far distant Athens. And that, as all historians and philosophers know, was considerable.
It would be a narrow mind, and prejudiced, that would imagine all pagan philosophy to have been alien or unfriendly to the truth. Fathers of the Church in the early ages, men like Clement, Cyril and Justin Martyr, to say nothing of St. Paul in his, speech to the academy in Athens, labored to show that Christianity is the culmination and not the contradiction of all true philosophy. In the fifth century Augustine borrowed heavily from Plato, and many centuries later St. Thomas Aquinas borrowed equally from Aristotle, both of them appropriating to the purposes of Christian theology the philosophic wisdom of men who lived and pondered the mystery of the universe 400 years before Christ was born.
The point is that the Magi who came to Bethlehem were led not alone by the shining of a star but by rays of light from the philosophical thought of their day. And that they brought with them not merely gold, frankincense and myrrh, material gifts, but intellectual and spiritual offerings, the fruit of their mind and their soul to lay at the feet of the Babe Jesus. Intellectuals we should call them, teachers of wisdom, creators of thought, sages, scholars, associates perhaps, in their own countries of what Socrates and Aristotle and Plato had been in Athens, Zoroaster in Persia, and we may add, of Confucius and Lao-Tsze in China.
At any rate they were the remote extreme, in intelligence and culture from the poor peasants, the shepherds and stable men whom they found at the crib of the One they had come from afar to seek.
And the significant fact, important to them at the time and of even more importance symbolically for all time is that the illustrious Magi and the illiterate shepherds met before Jesus Christ on a basis of equality. The beauty of the episode of the meeting of the wise men and the shepherds in Bethlehem is in this, that they knelt side by side and adored without any sense of condescension on the one side or of shame on the other.
And here I take it, is an important feature---an essential feature of the Christian religion---Christianity simplicity, humility, poverty of spirit in the rich and the wise and the powerful; and it lends dignity and nobility and even a touch of divinity to the unlearned and the lowly.
Today men are discussing the famous and familiar proposition "All men are created equal," and there seems to be a general tendency to reject the phrase as an obvious falsehood, a self-evident absurdity. But whatever be the fact in the political, or the social, or the intellectual world, in religion, all men are equal. Let me hasten to explain. I do not mean that one man makes no more spiritual or moral progress than another, but that when a man has progressed even to sainthood, he still counts himself no better than a sinner, or even a reprobate. As St. Paul says "What have you that you have not received; and if you have received, why do you glory as if you had not received?"---as if your moral and spiritual excellence were all your own doing. And again he says "by the grace of God I am what I am." And if I am not what I am by the grace of God, why should I glory as if I had made myself what I am? St. Philip Neri, seeing a condemned criminal on his way to execution, exclaimed "There goes Philip Neri, save for the grace of God." The saint associates himself mentally with sinners. The last thought in his mind would be self-complacency. The moment a saint considers himself no sinner, that moment he is a sinner and no saint.
And as with moral excellence, so with intellectual. The most learned man is always the humblest. A little learning inclines a man to pride: more learning leads him back to humility. When a man thinks he knows much, he knows nothing, and when he admits that he knows nothing, he knows much. I am speaking not in parables or riddles, I am not juggling phrases. I am saying what all great philosophers have discovered at the end of the road of wisdom; all the wise ones from Socrates down admit their ignorance. St. Paul says if he must glory he will glory in his infirmities. And so of the learned man, if he must glory, he will glory in his ignorance.
In these days when the word relativity is in everyone's mouth, it ought not to be difficult to see that all our knowledge is ignorance. Of course if I compare myself with an imbecile or a ten-year old child, I may seem to know something. But if I compare myself with Shakespeare, the myriad-minded, or Kant, or Goethe, or Thomas Aquinas, or with the man who made relativity famous, I am a pitiable ignoramus. And if even these great men compare what they know with what they do not know, they will confess with Isaac Newton that they have only been like children playing on the edge of the ocean of knowledge, and that the vast expanse still lies unexplored. Or, to use another simile, if one goes high enough into the skies, a hut and a mansion, a subway kiosk and the Empire State building seem of about the same height. And if one goes high enough in the realm of knowledge, if one could by a miracle go as high as God above man, the learning of a child in the grade schools and of a great philosopher would seem about the same.
So when the Magi came close to God, it would have been absurd for them to be puffed up because they were acquainted with some philosophies that were hidden from the little ones, the peasants at their side. Furthermore, it is possible that they knew the Hebrew Bible and that they had read in the prophet Ezechiel "Thus sayeth the Lord God: Remove the diadem, take off the crown . . . Exalt him that is low and abase him that is high." Indeed it is not incredible that on their visit to the new-born Babe they learned of His Mother's Magnificat, in which occur the words so familiar to all who attend the Catholic vespers, Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles. "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble, . . .He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart."
I hope I may be pardoned if I apply this lesson of Christian humility and Christian equality to conditions in my own, my native land America, which I love instinctively with a love of prejudice, though I try to love all men in every land. I am confident that it is not mere fancy on my part to see in the primitive and authentic American ideal a similarity with that of the Gospel. Equality of all men in the sight of God is taught in the Gospel, and equality of all men before the law is the keynote of our Constitution. So it is a fact that where the Christian religion loses influence, the spirit of democracy is endangered. And there are not wanting in America today indications that the old simplicity of life and democracy of manners are waning. Time was when the fundamental social principle in our country was simplicity, and equality. But now there seems to be a deplorable hankering for class distinctions, the disaster of the old world, the ancient curse both of Asia and of Europe. Aristocracy is the unnatural, artificial, unchristian system based upon the lie that one man is better than another because his blood comes from a slightly different source, because his family is, or has been prominent, because his traceable family line is longer, his genealogy prouder, or because---and this is the lowest and ugliest type of aristocratic theory---because he has more money than another.
Democracy, like Christianity, maintains that all such distinctions are arbitrary and altogether damnable. And it would take no great parade of argument to show that democracy is true and aristocracy false. There are plenty of offspring of noble families who have in their veins the "noblest blood" in Europe, who are none the less mentally insignificant, and indeed in not a few cases imbeciles. There are both here and abroad a disproportionate number of aristocratic malefactors, and it is almost the rule that the children of excessively rich parents are of no use to themselves, their families or to society; there is a superabundance of prodigal sons, and must I add, prodigal daughters of distinguished parents.
Furthermore---I say it with profound regret---there are too many Americans who were born of simple people, brought up from childhood to believe in the essential equality of rich and poor who, coming into money, have turned traitor to their early principles and have thrown away their birthright of democracy to take up the manners, the pride, the haughtiness and the insufferable self-satisfaction of the aristocracy. There are too many family tree hunters amongst us, too many American newspapers conducting genealogical departments; too many children of shop-keepers, of farmers, of miners, of mechanics, looking up badges and coats of arms; too many lowlifes madeup to be someone they are not; too many uniformed servant girls and serving men in American homes; there are too many marriages---loveless and often tragically unhappy---of clean-blooded American girls to dying foreign noblemen, because of the silly ambition of title-hunting mothers; too many American women madly desirous of being presented at some European court; too many rich Americans childishly proud of the permission to wear a medal, a sword, a cocked hat and breeches conferred upon them by some court in Europe. Such things may be in certain instances only foolish, but I fear that there often goes with them an arrogance, a sarcasm, a ridiculous delusion of superiority.
I wonder if that sort of thing can find place in the cave of Bethlehem. I wonder if one would go sword in hand, tall and feathery hat on head and trailing long silk robes on that earthen floor, to salute the poor little helpless Babe in the straw. The inconsistency is not only ridiculous, it would be sacrilegious. .
I hope I shall not be misunderstood to mean that the worship of Jesus Christ the Son of God should never be accompanied by beauty and splendor of ritual. He was born indeed in a stable, but we are not content to leave Him in that shameful place. We take Him from the proximity of cattle, place Him upon the altar and there we give Him, with all the magnificence we can muster, the adoration that is His due. But if a grand ceremonial involves the use of beautiful vestments by Christ's ministers, we expect them to remember that the splendor and the glory are not for them, but for their Master.
Indeed in the Catholic service we chant again and again: Non Nobis Domine, Non Nobis, "Not to us O Lord, not to us but to Thy Name be Glory." If a minister at the altar should be proud or vain he would be like a color bearer in a parade who would imagine that when men remove their hats as he passes by the reverence is to him and not to the flag he carries.
God grant, then, that we learn these lessons of Christmas: humility, simplicity, democracy of manner, and the spirit of poverty. For it seems to me that these sweet virtues are not only exemplified but are commanded to us by the fact that Jesus Christ. Son of David and what is infinitely more, Son of the Most High God, Incarnate in a human body, chose for His appearance upon earth the humblest and lowliest imaginable circumstances.