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Title: A Christmas Sermon
Author: Ross Winn
Date: 1902
Language: en
Topics: Christ, christianity, Christmas, religion
Source: Retrieved on March 13, 2012 from http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Sermon_%28Winn%29
Notes: Originally appearing in Winn’s Firebrand , Vol. I No. 4, December 1, 1902.

Ross Winn

A Christmas Sermon

A great many years ago ther was born, in an obscure village of

Palestine, a babe; and its parents were so poor that this little child

came into the world among the cattle and was laid in a manger upon a

couch of straw. This infant of lowly origin had not even the birth

certificate of legal parentage, for his mother was a virgin, and he was

the progeny of the gods — which in those days was the polite term for

bastard.

But above the humble place of this poor babe’s nativity there shone a

bright and radiant star — the star of genius. The great world of that

day was as indifferent to the doings of the common people, the toilers,

as it is to-day. The birth of a prince was an affair of great moment —

not because a prince was wiser, or better, or more noble than other men,

but because he WAS a prince, the son of a king. But this babe in the

manger was not a prince; he was the nameless offspring of poverty and

shame. But the star of genius, which has seldom lighted the birth-advent

of a tilted prince, stood over that lowly manger, and from the portals

of that cattle stall in Bethlehem, a new age issued forth, an age that

has been made glorious by the greatest achievements of the human race.

This child, Jesus, as he grew to manhood, was not much of a success in

life. He had no business enterprise, no financial ability. Instead of

adapting himself to circumstances and going in to make his pile, he

began to tramp around from place to place, making speeches against the

rich and well-to-do, and stirring up discontent among the poor. He even

attacked the religion of his time, and called the priests hypocrits,

which was very wicked and impious, altho he doubtless told the truth. He

assailed the established church of his day as bitterly as did Ingersoll

the church of HIS day, and with far less politeness. He went around with

a handful of ragged and shiftless followers like himself, for the most

part ignorant fishermen, who could neither read nor write. He associated

with rough and dissolute characters and was himself known as a

winebibber and a glutton. He refused to condemn lewed women, but

intimated that thy were but little worse than their male patrons. His

beard and hair were unkempt, he was negligent in dress, and of course

all the respectable well-to-do people called him an Anarchist, and

though he should be locked up as a matter of precaution.

His teachings were perfectly incomprehensible to the people of his day.

Not even his own disciples understood him. He wanted to “divide up

everything.” He was continually agitating against the social order. He

talked about the best people in society in the most disrespectful

manner, intimating that a full grown dromedary could gallop thru the eye

of a cambric needle with less difficulty than a Wall street magnate

would experience in squeezing under heaven’s golden gate. Like the true

Anarchist, he was always “agin the government,” and was looked upon by

the better classes as a perpetual nuisance and calamity howler.

He went around making stump speeches and steet talks, in violation of

the city ordinances. His motto seems to have been that of John Burns,

“Down with all that’s up, and up with all that’s down.” He not only

wanted the rich to give everything they possessed away to the shiftless

poor, but he inculcated improvidence as a virtue. He said “take no

thought for the morrow.” He wanted people to despise money and business

affairs, and to emulate the example of the fowls of the air and the

flowers of the field. He was opposed to authority, to government. He

decried punishment, repudiated resistance to evil-doers. He said let the

robbers rob; if they take your best Sunday coat, give them your

Roosevelt hat or your necktie, or anything else that will satisfy them.

Now, it is reasonably certain that he was not rightly understood. We do

not know that he was correctly reported. He certainly would not be by

the average American newspaper reporter of to-day. But assuming that

Jesus really said the things attributed to him, it is little wonder that

the ruling class of his day were anxious to be rid of him.

I suppose some people will object if I call Jesus an Anarchist, but I am

sure the whole world would call him that if he lived to-day, and

preached such doctrines. I believe that his most consistent disciple of

note in this generation is Count Leo Tolstoy, of Russia, who is an

Anarchist. And I am certain that the church that bears the name

Christian, does not believe in the doctrines taught by Christ. I am sure

that the people who put a lightning rod on their $50,000 churches do not

believe in the precept: “Take no thought for the morrow.” John D.

Rockefeller is a devout Baptist, but I suspect that he is not worrying

much about what Jesus said of the camel, the needle’s eye, and a rich

man’s chances of heaven. And so I say, Jesus was not understood in his

day, and that very few of his professed followers to-day care to

understand his teachings now. As the ruling class of that day had no use

for Jesus, they put him to death. That was not strange, if we reflect

that, in our own times, about nineteen centuries later, five men were

put to death in Chicago for holding and teaching views very similar to

those held and taught by Jesus. You see the ruling class of all

countries in all ages have very little sympathy with reformers and

revolutionists.

For three centuries after the death of the Gallilean reformer, his

followers were the object of persecution, and thousands suffered

martyrdom for their convictions. It seems very strange to us that these

early Christians should have been regarded as enemies of social order by

the Roman empire — that nameless crimes should have been charged to

them. History tells us that the Christians were outlawed; that every act

of violence committed against the Roman government was laid to them.

They were supposed to be thieves, assassins, and incendiaries. When Rome

burned, it was charged that the Christians did it. They were persecuted

with relentless vigor by the Roman government. They were hanged,

beheaded, burned at the stake, and fed to wild beasts. And their

persecutors honestly believed that they deserved this persecution.

This all sounds strange and wonderful in the light of our present

triumphant Christian civilization. But is not history being repeated,

right in our own time? Is not the present insane prejudice directed

against the Anarchists a parallel of the experience of the early

Christians? Does not the dominant power to-day view the Anarchists very

much as the dominant power of Rome viewed the Christians? Are not the

Anarchists charged with all crimes under heaven and relentlessly

persecuted by authority? Yet they teach, as did Jesus, a doctrine of

love and peace. Their very philosophy is the negation of violence — the

antithesis of crime. Yet it has been proposed in Congress to make even

the teaching of this philosophy of love and peace and human brotherhood

a crime, punishable with death. So really, we have not progressed very

far — our Christians to-day are not very far ahead of the pagans of

Nero’s time. And if Jesus should appear to-day, he would not be

crucified, perhaps, but he would certainly get the cold shoulder from

the church that is loudest in his worship. And he would find Judge Gary

not so fair a judge as Pilot; he would discover in President Roosevelt a

kindred spirit of Herod.

The Anarchists, some consciously, most of them unconsciously, are to-day

the exponents of the gospel which Jesus really proclaimed. I mean that

which is reported in the New Testiment as his teachings. I do not know

wheter he said those things or not, because I do not know whether any of

the New Testiment writings are authentic — nobody knows. But assuming

that Jesue said the things accredited to him, it is only the Anarchists

who now believe and practice them. He repudiated the principle of

authority, opposed punishment, and denied the right of judgement between

man and man. He condemned wealth. He was bitter in his denunciation of

the church and its priesthood. For this he was regarded by the

ministerial fraternity with about the same amount of affection that the

same class had for Ingersoll. Jesus appears to have been a unitarian in

theology; by which I mean that he though everthing in nature was an

expression of God. But the world could not comprehend this sublime

truth, and has stupidly given to Jesus a super-human character, which

none of his teachings warrent. Jesus declared himself to be one with

God. So was he, and so is every great and noble soul that has reached

the plane of SELF CONSCIOUSNESS. God, by which I mean that Supreme

Intelligence of which every atom of matter is a form of expression, is

universal. The orthodox church declares God to be omnipresent: If he is

omnipresent, he is all there is, because if aught existed that was not

God, God could not be omnipresent. The church maintains that man has a

free will, and that God is omnipotent: This is illogical absurdity,

because if one being besides God possessed a free will, that will would

be the limit of God’s power. Jesus taught none of these absurdities

preached in his name by the orthodox theologians. He founded no church.

He formulated no creed. He gave but one law — the law of love. “Love thy

neighbor as thyself, and God with all thy heart; upon these hang the law

and the prophets.” His one supreme injunction, in which he expressed the

sum of his social philosophy, was in these words: “Judge not that ye be

not judged.” This is the Anarchist formula. Stated in other terms it

means simply, “Mind your own business.”

It is quite evident that Jesus believed that he was come to herald a new

order, for the burden of his message was the destruction of the existing

system and power, and the institution of a new kingdom of perfection. A

referrence to the old Hebrew prophets, whom Jesus greatly respected and

often quoted, being himself a Jew, will give a full explanation of the

central idea of his agitation. Daniel, far back in the dim centuries,

had foretold the rise of the world’s four greatest empires, of which the

last, Rome, was approaching the heighth of its power at the time when

Jesus lived. But Daniel’s prophesy introduced a fifth, the Universal

Empire, in which humanity was to come into its own, and the Golden Age

of brotherhood and peace be realized. This fifth monarchy was to be

diverse from all previous governments, for it was to be built without

hands — i.e., direction or authority, and was to destroy all human

governments. It was to be of God, which is to say, of man, not men.

Jesus expected it to come in his day, because he saw the last of the

four empires that were to precede it fulfilled in the Roman power. He

thought that, as Rome had then reached her apex, the Universal Empire

would appear, and finish Daniel’s prophesy by establishing the universal

brotherhood. That this was the idea of Jesus’ mission is proven by the

fact that his followers continued to look for the coming of this new

empire long after his death. His friend and deciple, John, imprisoned on

lonely Patmos, paints in the sublime sentences of the Apocalypse a

vision of the coming of this Golden Empire, using the very types and

figures employed by the prophet Daniel in the first prediction.

The Anarchists to-day are proclaiming that ideal state, that Golden

Empire of Man, many unconscious of the fact that they are but repeating

the old, old prophesy of the sages and seers of past and forgotten ages.

But tho humanity has waited thru the long centuries, waited and watched

for that which is to come, we of to-day should gather hope that, for

those who have waited long, is the reward of realization. And this is

the Christmas message that THE FIREBRAND would give to all: The kingdom

of heaven is at hand. From the story of Jesus, be it true or mythical,

we may draw the divine inspiration that prophesies in darkness the

coming of the dawn.