I. A Christmas Lecture

Anyone speaking of the Christmas Mystery today must make a demand upon mankind that reaches into the future. We live in serious times and we must see clearly that we need again to become man in the true sense. We have not yet attained to the inwardness of the Magi wisdom nor to the piety which from the shepherds flowed into the outer world. The social question that confronts humanity is terribly urgent. Fearful things have come about in recent years and the social problem becomes ever more and more threatening; only those who are asleep in their souls can overlook this fact Europe as regards its culture, threatens to become a heap of ruins. Nothing can raise it from its chaotic condition unless men find it possible once again to develop a true, a real humanity in their common life. They will not be able to do this unless their feeling is deepened and made inward by an observation of nature in which they are as pious as the shepherds of the field when through their inner forces they received the Angel's revelation of God above and peace on earth beneath. Only with these forces can the social life be mastered. This will happen when the secrets of space and time are so understood inwardly that men comprehend the nature of the world-spirit as a unity just as the one sun is beheld by the Chinese and by the Americans and by the Middle European. It would be absurd if the Chinese demanded a sun for themselves, the Russians another sun, the Middle European another, the French another, and the English yet another. Just as the sun is a unity, so is the Sun-Being that bears humanity a unity. If we look out into the widths of space we find there the challenge to a unification of humanity. The spiritual that lies open to our view without does not speak of the differentiation of humanity or of discord; neither does what speaks in the inmost depths of our being. To the shepherds of the field, the voice they were able to hear by the power of their hearts announced that the Godhead was revealed in the widths of the world spaces and that by receiving the divine within one's own soul peace can be among men of good will. This must again be proclaimed to modern humanity from the whole circumference of nature. To the Magi from the East, the secrets of the stars told that here on earth Christ Jesus is born. This must be proclaimed to modern humanity from out of what can begin to be revealed in the deep places of the human heart.