The Highway Forums Announcements What's New on The Highway website? "A Merry Christmas" by Charles H. Spurgeon

And, first, the text gives a license. Now, ye souls who would deny to your fellowmen all sorts of mirth, come and listen to the merry bell of this text, while it gives a license to the righteous especially - a license that they meet together in their houses, and eat and drink, and praise their God. In Cromwell's days, the Puritans thought it an ungodly thing for men to keep Christmas. They, therefore, tried to put it down, and the common crier went through the street, announcing that Christmas was henceforth no more to be kept, it being a Popish, if not a heathenish ceremony. Now, you do not suppose that after the crier had made the proclamation, any living Englishman took any notice of it; at least, I can scarcely imagine that any did, except to laugh at it; for it is idle thus to strain at gnats and stagger under a feather. Albeit, that we do not keep the feast as Papists, nor even as a commemorative festival, yet there is a something in old associations that makes us like the day in which a man may shake off the cares of business, and disport himself with his little ones. God forbid I should be such a Puritan as to proclaim the annihilation of any day of rest which falls to the lot of the laboring man.