prophets before. He went forth, therefore, in the power of the Spirit. The same mind and being was in Him as in God. The Spirit was given to Him without measure. In Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The Spirit found the element of His life. He walked and worked in the Spirit. It set Him in an absolute unity of mind and will with the Father.

2. Secondly, however, the great purpose of His life was to make room for the presence of the Spirit under this new and more exalted character in the world at large. And He must Himself first die in the flesh, and rise again and be glorified, before this result could be reached. Why, is not now the question. Our object is not to advance speculations. We hold ourselves to the text. Why he could not be in the world except through Christ's person may not be clear. We state only the fact as taught in the New Testament. See the remarkable passage John vii. 37, 39: "On the last great," &c. No language can be more direct than this. It implies that the work of redemption must go through this process-follow the order of the creed-all this was necessary before the Spirit could go forth with freedom. This is the fact.

So, in the last discourse of our Saviour with his disciples, all stress is laid on the coming of the Spirit, as an event depending on His own death and resurrection. "I will pray the Father," &c. "I tell you the truth, it is expedient," &c. He was to go away in the flesh, only to return again in the Spirit. John xiv. 16, 19; xiv. 25, 26; xvi. 7, 8. "I have yet many," &c. 12, 13. On this promise all was to depend. "Behold I send the promise," &e, Luke xxiv. 49. To whom also He showed Himself alive after his passion," &c., Acts i. 3, 5. Acts ii.-Here we see how this promise began to actualize itself amid convulsions of nature, symbols of wind and fire. Here He came to them according to promise.

Here we must note three points:

1. First, the mission of the Holy Ghost in this full form is conditioned absolutely by the previous history of Christ completed in His glorification at the right hand of God. There is a necessary connection between one fact and the other. He must die and rise again, to make room for it. John xii. 23, 24. "The hour is come," &c., 31, 32. "Now is the judgment of this world," &c. The coming of the Comforter hangs on His going to the Father. So Luke xxiv. 25, 26. O fools," &c. 46. "Thus it is written, and thus it behooved," &c., Math. xxviii. 18. All power," &c. The Holy Ghost was now to carry out the conquest.

II. The mission of the Holy Ghost is strictly a continuation of Christ's work in the world, and its enlargement. It is plain from the passages quoted that Christ regarded it as such. It was more than the outward vindication of Christ. His removal must not be regarded as a loss, but as a gain. He would return under a higher form. It was to be more than His presence "in the flesh." It was the power of his glorified life. The fruit of his resurrection. His ascension gift. Being by the right hand of God exalted," &c. Acts ii. 33. And so 38, Repent and be baptized," &c. "Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince," &c. Acts 32, 33. Case of converts in Samaria. Acts viii. 14, 19. Saul of Tarsus. Acts ix. 17. So in the epistles passim. Christ's glorification is made to be the full outlet of His grace for the world, the enlargement of His activity; and this by the Spirit as the power of His new

..

life. The presence of the Holy Ghost then in the world in this form is in fact of one order with the new creation in Christ Himself. A supernatural order over against the order of nature. A real revelation of powers above nature, under a permanent historical form. To say less than this is to resolve the incarnation into gnostic smoke. The mission of the Spirit is the actual historical continuation of Christ's mission.

Then,

III. This grace and power necessarily have their own sphere of existence in the world, and this forms, in the New Testament view, the true idea and fact of the Church. The case supposes necessarily a permanent constitution. Not to own this is to fall back to Judaism, and to turn the incarnation into a mere theophany or avatar. If it be transient, it is not substance, not real; whether it be three years or thirty years is all the same. It is absolutely necessary to follow the creed regarding all as historical realities or to the article of the Church, holding it in the same real way-all is necessarily connected. To stop short in this, as we read the Church, is to fall back into gnosticism or Judaism.

This constitution again is not simply a new quality or power added to the general life of the world. It is an actual entrance into the world of the abiding presence of the Spirit in a form above nature, and so distinct from it. What Christianity has to do with here is not a new scheme of doctrine, or a new system of spiritual influence, or a new opportunity or facility of salvation for men at large in the order of nature, but a new form of existence itself. Not as though this constitution set the whole world in relation to God graciously. This would be to take from the head of Christ His crown, and from His hand the sceptre. It is a supernatural economy or sphere of truth and grace actually subsisting in the midst of the natural life of the world, and fulfilling its own history as a higher separate fact.

This, we say, is the Church. We go not here into the determination of its form. We look now only to the fact of its existence under the general character just described. It is the mystery of the Spirit's supernatural presence in the world-as we profess to believe in the creed. Such a real objective sphere and home of the Spirit is every where assumed in the New Testament. The whole power of the Gospel is based on this very supposition. This mystery is not to be grasped by natural men. is not to be brought to the bar of common sense. It challenges our faith under pain of damnation. It results from the fact of Christ's incarnation and glorification, and must be received as in the same order of facts by faith.

In conclusion, how solemn in such view is the whole doctrine of the Church! How utterly frivolous to make no account of it, or to make light of it! Oh, how poor is that Christianity which does not see and feel that this point is as vital and far-reaching as the fact of the incarnation itself; for it is this which makes the mission of Christ real. This is the test of our faith in the incarnation; for as we err or hold the truth in this fact, so do we err or hold the truth in reference to the mystery of the Holy Catholic Church.

HOLY CHRISTMAS.

From the German of KARL SCHEFFER.

BY THE EDITOR.

Besides the causes mentioned in the former article which led to the fixing of the time for the Christmas commemoration, there was originally a heathen festival and pre-Christian festival customs connected with it to which it was necessary to have reference, because this heathen festival was found generally rooted in the life and habits of society, and because it seemed desirable to displace it by a better one which should come in its stead.

When we think of the conversions en masse from the unchristian nations, as this was fvored and practised in the Old Catholic Church, we can readily appreciate what Gregory the Great lays down as a principle: "The festivals of the heathen must be gradually changed into Christian festivals, and these must imitate those which existed before."

The first part of this requirement seemed to claim a right from the fact that the heathen festival and festal customs had a significance so nearly allied to Christmas, and seemed to be an unconscious prophecy of it, pointing as shadow toward the substance.

Such foreshadowings pointing toward this Christian festival are found in the legendary annals of almost all peoples. They are found in the mythology of the East and the West, among cultivated and barbarous nations, in great fulness and in striking congruency.

Those nations which move and unfold their life wholly in the sphere of nature, exalted energies, events and secrets of the sensuous world to gods and divine essences. The sun became for them the Sun god. The Greeks called him Helios and Apollo; the Romans, Sol; the Persians, Mitteras; the Chaldeans and Phoenicians, Baal or Bel.

The day of the Winter Solstice, the day of the new birth of the light, by which the night is conquered, and the reign of day begins anew, formed itself in their myths into the birth-day of the Sun-god. For this reason they also began on this day a new year.

The deification of the stars, the worship of the sun as the queen of heaven, bestowing light and life, warmth and gladness, particularly prevailed, and was held in high honor among the Persians. They worshipped the Star of Day as Mitteras, a name which means brilliancy, light, sun; and they commemorated the birth of Mitteras exactly on the 25th of December, and not, as we might expect, on the 21st of December, which is properly the day of the Winter Solstice.

How the Magi and astromomers among the Persians knew to read the stars of heaven, and to inquire in regard to them, we learn, among other sources, from the coming of the wise men of the East," as the Scriptures

call them, who were led by a star to Palestine, where they sought the newborn King of the Jews, first in the palace at Jerusalem, and then, having been directed, back in the stable at Bethlehem. That astronomy and the religion of the Persians stood in near relation to Judaism may be historically seen and understood from the history of the time of the captivity and the act of Cyrus.

According to the Persian mythology, the god Mitteras was born in the dark, silent hour of midnight in a cave, on the 25th of December, and by the side of the new-born child stood an ox and an ass.

The Persians also commemorated, about the time of the Winter Solstice, the festival of Churremrus. On this festival the king descended from his throne, seated himself at the table with his subjects, and said: “I am become like one of you!"

What a singular, deep and striking reference to the birth of the Christchild! How wonderfully does it chime in with the idea of self-humiliation and self-renunciation which otherwise lies so entirely absent from the consciousness of the Orient! How all this falls in with the historical features of Christmas and its churchly customs!

The ancient Romans, who just at the time before and at the birth of Christ labored with great zeal, though with unsatisfied longings, accepted and introduced a foreign, principally an oriental, cultus and culture—a circumstance which contributed to the spread of Christianity in that worldkingdom; the Romans became acquainted with the mysteries of Mitteras or Mittera, through the victorious ending by Pompejus of the Sea-Robber war, B. c. 67, and the Sea Robbers at that time taken as captives. The mysterious oriental cultus which so powerfully moved their fancy and feeling, attracted them and brought to Rome, and at a later period into the Roman Church, such great taste for it. A great number of inscriptions and memorials have been found in almost all parts of the old Roman kingdom, which witness to the extensive spread of the Mittera service. In Rome's celebrated catacombs, which cover and disclose a whole world and a whole history of vanished generations-in the catacombs, these cities of refuge for the ancient Christians in which they held their assemblies of worship, these cemeteries for their martyrs in the times of bloody persecutionthere, among other things, a large stone slab has been discovered which, in a pictorial way, represents the festal commemoration of the scene already mentioned, namely, the birth of the Sun-god Mittera together with the ox and the ass, the two animal figures of the ancient Christmas symbols. At the time of the Winter Solstice the Hindoos celebrated their "Pougol," as "the Festival of the twilight of the gods, and of joy."

The Egyptians devoted to the same celebration the eleventh day of their month Tybi, which is, according to our calendar, the sixth day of January, the day of Epiphany Festival. This Egyptian festival day furnishes an explanation of the fact that the oriental church, especially the gnostic sect of Basilidians, according to the testimony of Clement of Alexandria, originally regarded the 6th of January, and not the 25th of December, as the birth-day of Christ.

The Egyptian goddess Isis, whose cultus also found acceptance in Rome, and is said even from Italy to have penetrated into Germany,* and

*Some, for example, trace the name of Luther's birth-place, Eisleben, in Latin Islebia, Isislebia, back to an image of Isis once located and worshipped in that locality.

whose myths and mysteries just about the time of Christ's birth found favorable notice in the West, brought forth her son at the time of the Winter Solstice. In picture, teaching, and mysteries the goddess-mother was represented by them in the act of giving to the sun-god his first nourishment. The child was pictured as sitting in his mother's lap, with bound up feet, and wrapped in linen clothes, and sometimes also as a boy standing before his parents, Isis and Osiris. How far exactly the Egyptian mystic and symbolic has, with some mixture of Jewish forms of cultus and elements of Christian life, in certain secret circles, maintained and perpetuated itself to this day is not known to the uninitiated. This one thing, however, we know, that the sun as far as it shines and gladdens the hearts of men, is the most general and most beautiful symbol of Christ.

By another mythological representation was commemorated in Egypt the Festival of Osiris' birth as the Egyptian Sun-god. It was a day of special joy, and those engaged in its commemoration called in shouts to one another: "We have found him! Rejoice with us!"

Here also we may mention the inscription on the temple at Sais, which is generally put into the mouth of Isis. It is, "The Son to which I have given birth is the Sun."

In nearest Asia there were symbolical festival customs at the time of the Solstice which pictured forth the course of the sun as it is first restrained and then advances. For the idol Moloch, who with his stierhead reminds us of Minotaurus in the Labyrinth, fires were kindled. To Baal, Bel, or Belus, who appears, now as Sun-god, now as Hercules, offerings were brought. According to the myth of the Phoenicians and the Tyrians the Sun-god sleeps in winter, and they celebrate his waking with festivals and offerings toward the end of December. The irony of the prophet Elijah refers to this sleeping and waking, when, in his contest with the priests of Baal, he said: "Cry aloud; for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be waked." 1 Kings, xviii. 27.

In the Greek mysteries, about the same season of the year, the newborn Dionysos was represented at his mother's breast, and honored as the god of the year.

By far the most striking reference to the 25th of December, and the clearest foreshadowing of it, and the manner of its commemoration, we have in the legends and customs of Rome. Its poet Virgil must be regarded as giving expression to the longings of the people for the world-redemption when he sings:

Then returns again the Virgin,
The reign of Saturn then returns;
Then shall a new scion spring forth
From the highest heaven.*

Christian representations and Christian ideas naturally associate themselves with the word "Virgin," "reign of Saturn," and "with the newborn Son who springs forth from Heaven," especially when one calls to mind the old prophecy, which the Romans also knew, and not willingly believed: "Salvation is of the Jews!" John iv. 22.

Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;

Iam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto. (Eclog. iv.)