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Show THE ORIGIN OF NEW YEAR FESTIVALS. The celebration of the coming of the New Year Is but a continuation of an ancient pagan festival. The ancients had learned by experience when the days began to lengthen. They did not know why, but they had discovered that on a certain cer-tain day the change came that was the harbinger of another awakening of the earth from its winter sleep, of another spring, another harvest. So they celebrated the event. The harvest of the previous year had been gathered, another harvest was promised, and so it was a meet time for rejoicing. Why the sun shouhiwander far away, why the birds should cease to sing, why whole families of them' should at a certain time take wing and fly away to the south; why the voices of the streams should become muffled and all the Ulr should bo fllled with storni-tonei, they could not comprehend compre-hend Neither could they understand why upon a certain day, the drift of the sun away from tho earth should cease and it should begin to retrace Its steps, but thoy found by watching that it never failed, and it was natural for thorn to begin to hail the season with rejoicings. It may be it was the time from which men's faith dated, that from it men began to believe that, as the earth had its death and its resurrection, eo might man. And with glimpses of another spring for the scul when the winter of Death shall have passed, they brought gratitude with their festivities. With more light modern men oan hail the day. They have learned the order of tho season's processions; proces-sions; the movement of planets and suns in their orbits; they have learned that infinite beneficence was in Nature's original plan; that long before the earth became a habitation for man, indeed millions of years before man had any existence except in the mind of God; it was stored with What mortals would need, and the Infinite swung its orbit where it would receive from the sun the varying temperatures which would make its seasons; sea-sons; its seasons of growth, of fruition, of rest, and make of it a loving mother to the race that was to be. It is right then to hail its annual great Itanotuation roint with joy, right, too, for men to make it a day of feasting and happy greetings; right, because Jt is to man a symbol that beyond this life there will be other and sweeter, happy greetings in a land whore tliere are no winters to the world, where the music never ends in a death-chant. death-chant. That land where flowers bloom always, where fruits continually ripen and never decay, where youth and hope have no clouds before them, where progress is the changes rule, and true souls advance ever toward higher fields Unmindful Unmind-ful of. aught save the increasing splendors that CDme to meet them in that immjjj&al UfeJjpYhich there is neither anxiety rfJr fear, iiwt 'only the never ceasing joy that commas as more and more the soul takes on appreciation of God's majesty and God's plans for the eternal happiness of His creatures. |