Yule and Christmas. By Alexander Tille, Ph.D. (David Nutt.) —Dr.
Tille has taken a great deal of pains to connect the Christmas festival with various observances and customs in old German life. It would require the knowledge of a specialist, to which the writer of this notice cannot pretend, to put a right value on his arguments. But we may say emphatically that if he is as rash in his archmology as he is in his theology, his -dis-. quisitions are not worth very much. "The Early Church," he- says (p. 119), " did not regard Christ as a God from birth, but merely as having become one when he was thirty years old, and when the Holy Ghost descended upon Him at the Baptism in Jordan." There was among the many heresies of Early Chris- tianity one of this kind, but to say that it was the received opinion of the whole Church, and that the orthodox doctrine arose, as Dr. Tille goes on to say, at the beginning of the third century in the Western Church (p. 120), is preposterous. As for Christmas, we are inclined to hold, anyhow for the present, the common belief that it had its origin in the Saturnalia.
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