A Jolly Folly?. Allan J. Macdonald

satirical pamphleteer, Josiah King, put it this way in his fictional personification of Christmas:

      Christmas is a very kind and loving man; inoffensive to all: a hater of strife, a lover of harmless mirth. . . . He uses all means to bring us together, & to renew friendship: he is a great Peacemaker.

      In his account of Christmas’s trial before the Puritan courts, a needy man gives the following evidence:

      I dwell at the Town of Want, in the Country of Needs . . . poor in estate: and had it not been for old Christmas I had been poorer. . . . If you take away this merry old Gentlemen from us, you take away all our Joy, and comfort that we have.56

      Various protests were made against the suppression of the festival. Although Parliament sat every Christmas Day from 1644 to 1656, the shops in London did not always open and those that did were often roughly harassed. In 1647 evergreen decorations were put up in the city, and the Lord Mayor and City Marshal had to ride about setting fire to them! There were even riots in country places, notably Canterbury, Bury St. Edmunds, and Norwich. The following account from Canterbury, although undoubtedly biased and pro-Christmas, gives a flavor of the unrest:

      The mayor, endeavouring to keep the peace, had his head broke by the populace and was dragged about the streets; the mob broke into diverse houses of the most religious in the town, broke their windows, abused their persons, and threw their goods into the streets, because they exposed them to sale on Christmas Day. At length, their numbers being increased to above two thousand, they put themselves into a posture of defence against the magistrates, kept guard, stopped passes, examined passengers, and seized the magazine and arms in the town-hall, and were not dispersed without difficulty.57

      A petition with more than ten thousand signatures from the Kent region demanded either the restoration of Christmas or else the king back on the throne. The unpopular laws banning Christmas likely played some part in the English cry for the restoration of the crown.

      With the restoration in 1660, Christmas naturally came back to a position of full recognition but most English Calvinist ministers still disapproved of Christmas celebration. Misson, the French traveller, reported as follows:

      From Christmas Day till after Twelfth Day is a time of Christian rejoicing; a mixture of devotion and pleasure. They . . . make it their whole business to drive away melancholy.58

      Seventeenth Century Baptists

      During this period, English Protestants were still working out what practices were acceptable and unacceptable in worship. Take, for example, Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), a Particular Baptist pastor in London. The Child’s Delight was written by Keach as a primer for children and reveals in clear terms Keach’s antagonism to the corruption, as he saw it, of the Roman Catholic Church. First published in 1664 as The Child’s Instructor, this handbook stirred up a controversy and landed Keach at the Assizes in Aylesbury before Lord Chief Justice Hyde, on the charge of violating the 1662 Licensing Act, the law regulating the content of printed books.

      Keach eventually served two weeks in prison and saw the primer burned in an effort to purge the land of heresy. Among other things, the Licensing Act forbade the printing of any:

      heretical, seditious, schismatical or offensive books or pamphlets, wherein any doctrine or opinion shall be asserted or maintained which is contrary to the Christian faith or the doctrine or discipline of the Church of England.

      It is interesting to note which issues Keach chose to be of fundamental importance in writing the primer. He presented lessons on the character of God, the child’s place before God, and a series of Solomon’s proverbs. He also set the Ten Commandments into verse form for ease of learning. Part 2 of the manual’s catechism refuted the Roman church, teaching a rejection of any priest or vicar other than Christ and of the sacrifices by priests of the Roman church. We note with particular interest his view of worship, taking a strict constructionist view of acceptable worship, arguing that elements of worship are acceptable only as long as they are directly authorized by Scripture.

      Keach’s religious position, strongly Protestant and unashamedly anti–Roman Catholic is clear. His pro-Reformation writing may not differ much from other separatists and nonconformists of the time but he was clearly operating from the mentality of the Reformation as the most important guiding force in recent history.59

      The Breach Repaired, Keach’s exposition to prove congregational singing, serves as another example of how he intertwined the Reformation with his aim of purifying the church. When Keach wrote The Breach Repaired in 1691, twenty-seven years after his initial primer appeared, he explicitly affirmed the vitality and relevance of the Reformation to his cause. He depicted the church as still in the process of Reformation, newly come out of “the Wilderness, or Popish Darkness and not so fully neither, as to be clear as the Sun, as in due time she shall.” Reformation, he argues, is and ever was a hard and difficult work, it being no easy thing to restore lost ordinances.

      How then did Keach and other seventeenth century Baptists, such as Hercules Collins and John Spilsbury, treat Christmas in their worship? This is not easy to answer as there are virtually no extant writings on this subject by any seventeenth century Baptist. There are several passing references to events which took place on December 25, where the term “Christmas Day” is used, but as this was the social norm among the majority of the populace, it tells us little. Clearly, the scarcity of any written treatment of the subject tells us that it simply was not an issue in their church life. Arguments from silence must always be handled with caution, but what does this written silence imply? Was it the case that Christmas services formed an integral part of worship throughout their congregations and therefore was not an issue for discussion, or was it the case that Christmas services formed no part of worship throughout their congregations and so there existed unanimity on the issue? It is extremely likely to have been the latter. Baptists had consistently received a very bad press from paedo-baptists, whether Anglicans, Presbyterians, or Independents. It was commonplace for them to be portrayed as a threat and likened to the radical Zwickau Prophets and Thomas Müntzer, from the era of Luther and who appeared to have influenced the emerging Anabaptist movement. Throughout the seventeenth century, Baptists, especially Calvinistic Baptists, sought to demonstrate their orthodoxy to their paedo-baptist counterparts and this was one of the main reasons lying behind The First London Baptist Confession of Faith, published in 1644 prior to the Westminster Confession of Faith. There is no known dissent from Baptists to the Puritan outlawing of Christmas in Parliament. There is much in Baptist writings, such as Keach’s just referred to, which show their aversion to all things Roman Catholic.

      The General Baptist, Thomas Grantham (1633–92), spoke of the suspicious nature of “festival days” including Easter:

      And indeed the variety of the usages of Ancient Christians touching the Lent Fast, shews it to be an Innovation, and not of Divine Authority: No, the Observation of Easter itself is acknowledged by Socrates Scholasticus to have crept into the churches.60