He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forest
worshipper began the worship of the tree, he began to bring to it his
offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists in
offering something: to worship is to give. In after ages when man had
learned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitive
custom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during
that immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to set
one stone on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove--the
only cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was
prayer. So that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the
Christmas Tree it is a survival of grave rites in the worship of
primitive man and is as ancient as forest worship itself.
And now he began.
With the pointer in his hand he touched the star at the apex of the
fir. This, he said, was commonly understood to represent the Star of
Bethlehem which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on the
Night of the Nativity--the Star of the New Born. But modern
discoveries show that the records of ancient Chaldea go back four or
five thousand years before the Christian era; and as far back as they
have been traced, we find the wise men of the East worshipping this
same star and being guided by it in their spiritual wanderings as they
searched for the incarnation of the Divine.
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