him now and smiled, and, as if in embarrassment, looked down and pushed aside a thigh-bone with her little foot, then Anavalt could see that the Elle Maid was, when properly regarded, a lovely and most dear illusion.

He kissed her. He was content. Here was the woman he desired, the woman who did not exist in the world where people have souls. The Elle Maid had no mortal body that time would parody and ruin, she had no brain to fashion dreams of which he would fall short, she had no heart that he would hurt. There was an abiding peace in this quiet Wood of Elfhame wherein no love could enter, and nobody could, in consequence, hurt anybody else very deeply. At court the silken ladies wept for Anavalt, and three women were not ever to be healed of their memories; but in the Wood of Elfhame, where all were soulless masks, there were no memories and no weeping, there were no longer two sides to everything, and a man need look for no reverses.

"I think we shall do very well here," said courteous Anavalt as yet again he kissed Maid Vae.

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RE any sort?

Successive religions, each with its

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Mass) as a celebration of the birthday of Jesus? Are you interested in the pre-Christian origins of that celebration, in the long and swelling stream of pagan legend and primitive custom which had poured into that midwinter festival before the Christian church adopted it?

Do you care for children not with shallow sentiment as something expected of every one, but with real affection? Do you love humanity, or perhaps wish to, and feel the beauty of trying even once a year to show that love? And what do you think of Santa Claus?

If your mind works clearly, you may well ask what the last question has to do with the others. And truly it has very little of a genuine nature. The invention of this bearded secular saint is only one tiny twisted twig on an enormous tree, if I may so mix my figures of speech. It is a comparatively recent growth, extremely local, in all ways negligible.

The beginning of the celebration is old indeed. It marks "the turn of the year," the winter solstice by the Julian calendar. The sun, visible fountain of life and comfort, health and pleasure, had been going farther and farther away, but paused for a little, and came back again. The day of that turning was a promise of joy, of spring and summer, of blossom and harvest.

added continually to ancient habits, and the mid-winter festival spread far and wide, with varying attendant customs.

Through Rome, where the twentyfifth of December was celebrated as the birthday of the unconquered sun, we trace back to the Syrian sun-god Baal; from Greece we get the worship of the child Dionysus, born of a maiden, near the same date; and in Mithraism, which ran neck and neck with Christianity for a time, sun-day was a holy day, dedicated to the sun.

It was natural enough that the early Christian fathers, struggling against the tide of pagan customs, should claim the day for the birth of their sun of righteousness.

If you are interested in the rich world of Christmas legend and custom, delve into "Christmas in Ritual and Tradition" by C. A. Miles. He shows how the Roman Saturnalia, just before Christmas, and the calends beginning on New Year's day, were times of joyous celebration, with kindness to the poor and to slaves, riotous jollification, banqueting, and drinking to excess; and how the early church, intensely ascetic, associating beauty, joy, and license with the heathenism they fought against, strove its best to turn the feast-day to a fast-day.

"The conflict was keen at first. The Church authorities fight tooth

and nail against these relics of heathenism, these devilish rites; but mankind's instinctive paganism is insuppressible, the practices continue as ritual, though losing much of their meaning, and the Church, weary of denouncing, comes to wink at them, while the pagan joy in earthly life begins to colour her own festival."

So followed the natural growth of Christian myth and custom, song and story, varying with race, country, and time; some still known to us, some left in the dark ages where they belonged, but under all is the beautiful truth taught by Him whose birth is commemorated.

In no other religion has there been so lovely a vision as this, divine love coming on earth as a baby, a little child, that child growing up to teach of human unity, of God in man, of worship in love and service. It is more than fitting that such a birthday should come to be "the children's festival."

Every age has its preferred forms of expression, its specific customs, and Christmas, in social evolution, reflects the characteristics of every race and nation, every period, with its tastes and feelings. Throughout medieval Europe there survived many of the barbaric performances, dressing in skins and heads of beasts, or men in women's clothes; and much of the horrible remained also in hobgoblin, Ruprecht, and Klapperbock.

This Knecht Ruprecht, Klas, or Joseph went about with the procession of maskers, clad in skins in some regions, and gave the children nuts and apples if they could say their prayers perfectly; if not, he punished

them. As Mr. Miles puts it, "In Protestant north Germany the Episcopal St. Nicholas and his Eve have been replaced by Christmas Eve and the Christ Child, while the name Klas has become attached to various unsaintly forms appearing at or shortly before Christmas."

St. Nicholas gradually became known as the children's patron saint, and "in the early seventeenth century a Protestant pastor is found complaining that parents put presents in their children's beds and tell them that St. Nicholas has brought them." This he said was "a bad custom, because it points children to the saint, whereas we know that not St. Nicholas but the holy Christ Child gives us all things for body and soul, and it is he alone whom we ought to call upon.'

In this far-reaching work of Mr. Miles from which these quotations are taken, with its full bibliography, careful index, wealth of research, we find only one scant notice of our own predominant "Saint": "As Santa Klaus St. Nicholas is of course known to every English child, but rather as a sort of incarnation of Christmas than as a saint with a day of his own. Santa Klaus probably has come to us via the United States, whither the Dutch took him, and where he still has immense popularity." In Dawson's "Christmas and Its Associations" he is mentioned only twice, giving the same origin.

This popularity, this supercession of all deeper, holier ideas and beliefs by a single fantastic superstition, is probably due to one misguided piece of verse.

"Let me make the songs of a people, and who will may make their laws," cried the wise man, or as Whitman

said of the poet, "In war he is the best backer of the war- he fetches artillery as good as the engineer's - he can make every word he speaks draw blood."

Dante showed us heaven and hell in vivid picture, Milton presented Satan as a tremendous personality, and the author of "The Night before Christmas" has given us Santa Claus, even to the names of his reindeers, with every detail of physical grossness, soot-soiled furs and stump of a pipe.

§ 3

Christmas has changed as we have changed, until to-day the prevalent idea of its celebration in our country, is roast turkey and a Christmas-tree, a banquet and the giving and receiving of presents. With most Protestant Christians it is not so much a church festival as a family one, though even Unitarians sing "It came upon a midnight clear" and "O little town of Bethlehem" on the nearest Sunday.

The "Christmas spirit," however, is still urged, and we vaguely feel that this is something beyond the family circle. Special appeals for charity are made. Dinners are given to newsboys and other hungry persons. There is something pathetic, if not absurd, in the scant periodicity of our social affection, this loving one another in an annual spasm.

But for the most part Christmas is a domestic affair, and, as the children's festival, is in their minds almost wholly a matter of getting something good. Long before they are big enough to make their little gifts they have acquired the habit of receiving them. The most advanced illustration of this "Christmas spirit" is seen among crafty little boys who go to

Sunday school assiduously in December, perhaps to more than one, with an eye single to the profits.

To what do we owe so sad and strange a collapse of our idealism? How has the birthday of the Child Jesus come to be an occasion for hypocrisy and greed in children, an opportunity for ingenious plans for self-aggrandizement?

Is it not visibly because of our substitution for the gracious and loving Teacher, the lover of all humanity, of this chimney-climbing distributer of presents, Santa Claus?

To what weakness in ourselves, what surrender to primitive relationships and minor gratifications, do we owe his looming so large as almost to obliterate the loveliest truth we know?

"St. Nicholas" is a dignified figure enough, but this most undignified "Santa"! It is one of the saddest descents in the history of mythology-Jesus, St. Nicholas, Santa Claus!

Look at the long story: first the legitimate celebration of a genuine god; then the wavering veils of custom covering the old beginnings; then the great new-seen truth set up on the old foundation, a nobler story than the sun-myths; then, gradually, new tales and customs obscuring the new truth, the saint instead of the deity; and at last, instead of the saint, this cheap fairy-tale of a red-nosed, pot-bellied, benevolent old kobold, who lies dormant up in the arctic regions somewhere from year's end to year's end, save for this one night's activity, this reindeer-and-sleigh affair, this bulging bundle, and chimney-sweep descent to distribute his benefactions.

A purely local legend, having no appeal in warm countries, with no element of beauty to make up for its lack

of truth, the Santa Claus myth seems the poorest of all that have grown up in modern times around this ancient festival.

As first promulgated, we seem to find the coming of the saint as much of a threat as a promise, a sort of a parent's assistant; for the "good" child a present, for the "bad" one a birch rod, merely a part of the vain lying with which ignorant and incompetent parents have always tried to coerce their children.

There may be "truth" in fiction, "truth" even in fairy-tales,-many a wise myth or lovely legend has helped the human mind, but there is also possible sheer degradation for old or young in unworthy fiction.

Then comes the outcry of sentiment, that superficial sentiment which attaches itself easily to whatever happens to be current, forgetting better things behind.

"Children love Santa Claus," we are told. To this we may answer that children above a certain age do not, for they know there is n't any such person; that children below a certain age do not, because they are too little for even fairy-tales, and that those in between will soon outgrow their delusion. Then if no more of them are told the tale, they will miss nothing, for there are better ones.

But is it not a pity that we have roused that ineffably sweet and tender thing, the love of a child, and artificially attached it to this unworthy image? Here is an annual rejoicing, represented to childish minds by glittering symbols and delightful toys and sweetmeats, a day kept because of the coming of the sun, and then of divine love in human form, and this golden opportunity to teach that divine love, to

rouse returning love for human beings, which we deliberately divert to teach love for an empty fabrication.

Jesus said, "Suffer little children to come unto me," and we have driven them to Santa Claus instead!

His is an interested, even a sordid, affection. The real love making the gifts, the love of parents, brothers, sisters, friends, is not conditional. The mother often loves the "bad" child best, and the divine love we talk about was expressly directed to sinners rather than to the righteous.

Have we no foresight, no glimmer of knowledge of child psychology, that we dwell on the child's pleasure in believing the poor legend we teach him and forget his pain when he finds it false, that we have deliberately deceived him?

"I believed it long after the other children gave it up," says one. "I believed it because my mother told me it was so, and my mother never lied." What of her feelings when she found that her mother did?

Not all children suffer equally at this first great disillusionment; it depends on the intensity of their faith and love. Has not life enough of disappointment and loss that we should choose the first fresh years, the unquestioning faith of babyhood, to set up this cheap idol, which must so soon come down?

The child has no words to express a pain like this, the bitter, cureless grief of finding that what one loved is not, and never was. The shock of learning that the parents, the elders, those whom we wholly trusted, are not to be trusted; not merely that they may be mistaken, but that they tell what they know is false, this we prepare for our children. This we have given them