CHAPTER I: THE SEASON OF ADVENT A DVENT is a paradoxical season; like a Col lege commencement, it registers a beginning as well as an end. In the mystic spiral of Christian experience, Trinity-tide gathers up and applies the lessons so far learned, and naturally develops a craving for future revelations yet to be. Year by year, Advent satisfies this craving, and is welcomed by faithful hearts with a sense of relief. In the quaint words of the old hymn, we rise to stretch our wings and trace our better portion. Our imagination is eagerly quickened, and we hear with exhilaration the solemn trumpet-call, "It is high time to awake out of sleep." The season is at once retrospective and prophetic; it looks backward to the Incarnation, forward to the Day of Doom, and within these two Comings of God in humanity, His Coming as the Child and as the Judge, is implicitly comprised all relation of Christ to His world. Christianity is an historic religion, and in Advent the historic sense is particularly strong. Christianity is also a philosophical and ethical religion, and in Advent the initial principles which should define the Chris tian attitude are sharply brought out into light. From either point of view, the message of the season is threefold. It is a message of Change, it is a message of the Kingdom of God, and it is a message of Judgment. The message of Change is patent. The first social lesson of the Christian Year is that of life's perpetual flux. Movement, not stability, is the law of the Christian life, and of God's self-revelation in history. This is a fact important to realize at the outset; for our instinct is often to stay put, and to envisage change with distrust and dread; while the fundamental method of the Church is to keep us steadily, as Maeterlinck says we should be kept, in the light of a great expectation. The first thing she does with us is to turn us to face the future. Institutional religion is constantly criticized as being formal, static, ultra-conservative. And no liberal can deny that the criticism is partly just, when he remembers the impenetrable wall of opposition to social developments which the Church has often presented; indeed, it suffices him to recall the rôle of organized religion during the Great War. It is good for the liberal to curb his impatience by recognizing the legitimate reason for this tendency. As every Catholic knows, the Institution preserves a mystic impulse at its heart; it exists to offer in a world of change the sure refuge of contact with eternity; and when men gain power to "break through" into this refuge, they are very likely at first to lose their sense of instability and their interest in motion. Now it is restful to find in religion an eternal calm; but if we read the Scriptures aright, we realize that it is fallacious. For legitimate rest is found, not in cessation but in the harmonious rhythms of growth; and the true Eternity in which the religious man consciously abides is no majestic frozen pause, but an unfolding life that flows forever from the Divine. Our God is today a God known to us only in process. We are forever children of process ourselves, and we would better frankly carry our evolutionary ideas over into our relations with the Eternal, and neutralize that dangerous old impulse to stiffen in our minds as soon as we become religious. Be this as it may, the conservative habits of organized religion find scant sanction in the authoritative life and teaching of the Church: the cycle of Christian experience starts with solemn emphasis on the warning note of perpetual change; and there is a revolutionary quality to Advent emotion. The first Collect, repeated every day till Christ mas, is the dominant of the season. In magnificent cadences, it spans the whole course of Christian history, and faces us toward the eternity which lies beyond. No one who prays it can run contented, squirrel-wise, in his round. It generates at once the temper of noble excitement. The Epistle for this first Sunday calls us back to sobriety; it opens with enumeration of plain moral duties summed up in the law of love. Christianity never fails in steadfastness and sanity, but neither does it ever stop with them; and all of a sudden, unexpectedly, St. Paul quickens our blood with the superb passage: "Knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light." In like manner, the second Epistle begins characteristically with warning us to be true to past tradition in all pioneer adventure; but loyalty to "whatsoever things were written aforetime" leads out instantly to hope, and to the exhilarating reminder that tradition exists to expand, and that the Gentiles are to rejoice with the Chosen People. The third and fourth Epistles find incentive to fidelity, in expectation of the time when the hidden things of darkness shall be brought to light, |