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Alice Malden.—Her domestic Employments.—Christmas in the olden Time.—Derived from the Saturnalia.—Nero, the first Persecutor of the Church.—His Saturnalia.

Christmas was rapidly drawing near: the snow lay thick upon the ground; but our young ladies, provided by careful mamma with warm snow-boots, could take outdoor exercise and visit with her the cottages of the working classes, to dispense tickets for coals and blankets provided by the general charity of those inhabitants of Selwood who were willing and able to help their poorer neighbours. Alice Malden, the motherless daughter of the good rector, was often their companion on these expeditions; she, being nearly twenty, frequently took charge of her younger friends, who derived great advantage from the intercourse with one whose experience in life was untinctured with formality. The necessity of supplying the place of her mother, as the head of the family, at the early age of sixteen, had given solidity to her character, which Christian piety had tempered with the spirit of love. Her deep grief for the loss of her beloved mother had not prevented her from endeavouring to perform her new duties, though her studious turn of mind had rather disposed her to scholastic than domestic employments. But the internal comfort of the house depended upon female arrangement: the rector was not rich, and had had several sons by a former wife to set forward in life, and being, like most of our Anglican Church, charitable to all who needed it, the prudent economy of his young daughter enabled him to do much without great self-sacrifice. As Constance and Ellen were very fond of Alice, they were often with her, and sometimes even aided her in sundry domestic offices. If they found her with a basket of stockings to mend, in her little private sanctum, they were only too happy to assist her.

Sometimes they found her in the store-room making pastry, cakes, or bread, and the sisters with looking on were soon able to help her, till at last they were inspired with the laudable ambition of learning the art of confectionary themselves. Now, some of my young lady readers may think that the daughters of gentlemen of fortune need not concern themselves about such matters as these, particularly when a hired housekeeper in their own houses arranges and prepares everything of the kind that may be needed. Plain needlework, too, can be done cheaply in schools, and even by sewing machines. This, in one sense, may be true, and agrees with the natural division of labour, if no change of circumstances could come; but the course of this world is not always smooth: “riches,” we are told, “make to themselves wings and fly away;” while the knowledge of any useful art, however humble it may be, is not lost though its exercise may be left off when not actually necessary. Constance and Ellen, who never had a thought their mother might not share, consulted her upon the propriety of learning Alice’s domestic accomplishments, and received her approbation of the plan in this manner. Opening the Bible, she read from the tenth verse of the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs to the end, the description given by King Lemuel’s mother of the virtuous woman, whose price is beyond rubies.

“There, my dear children, we have a complete enumeration of domestic employments practised by a rich woman, whose piety and charity gave a stimulus to her industry. I never find Alice performing so cheerfully her homely household duties without thinking of this passage in Proverbs. Accomplished and well informed as she is in social intercourse, there is to me something infinitely more interesting in her while employed for the general good of her family. She is what a clergyman’s daughter ought to be,—a young woman adorning the Christian profession. A blessing indeed seems to rest on all she does, for if poor she makes many rich.”

Under Alice’s teaching her young friends learned the art of making mincemeat, that indigestible Saxon dainty found in Richard the Second’s cookery-book, and derived from the piratical Saxon rovers, who had ventured up the Archipelago in their long chiules^[2] to plunder the East and improve their festal days with the fruits and spices of fairer lands. Alice amused them by relating the old custom of bringing as many small mince-pies in one dish on the Christmas table as the master and mistress of the house had been married years, and that in the Memoirs of a Puritan clergyman of the name of Walker, by his wife,^[3] she mentions that fifty-six mince-pies were set upon the table, according to the years of their wedded life. “It is a pretty book, too,” said Alice, “one that did me good in many ways; but I ought to have told you, that what remained uneaten of these Christmas pies was given to the poor the following day. Many old customs as well as this,” she said, “had passed away. Some, indeed, ‘were more honoured in the breach than the observance,’ such as the burlesques upon the Church, permitted to the people before the Reformation, when riotous games and quaint masquerades both preceded and followed Christmas; when folly, under an elected abbot of misrule, subverted for a time Christian decency and order; servants no longer reverenced their masters, but turned them into ridicule before their faces, so that from the palace of the king to the hall of the noble, or the monastery of the monk, these revels prevailed, when the low-born thrall for a time seemed to have changed his place in the household. These customs,” she was happy to say, “were not Christian, they were essentially heathen, derived from the feast of the Saturnalia, held on the 21st of December and some days after, when the slaves were allowed the privilege of shaking off the yoke of servitude and electing masters from among themselves. But, even while adopting to please her converts these absurdities, the Church had opened the gates of hospitality to all. Every larder was open to relieve the wants of the hungry, and the houseless poor found a shelter in the proud baronial hall, and this redeeming feature alone divided it from its heathen parentage. It had been the policy of the Church to replace by Christian festivals the old heathen ones to which custom had attached her converts; but this laudable motive had not always been productive of good effect, and was besides in direct opposition to the rules laid down by St. Paul, in many of his epistles.” But Alice had something still to say, “respecting the Saturnalia originally founded by Sextius Tullus, Rome’s best and wisest king, to soften the woes of slavery which he had himself felt. To Christians its name would ever recall the era of the first persecution of the Church, when Nero gave to the cross, or arrayed in the flaming tunic, the innocent and faithful followers of Christ, against whom he had for some time hoarded his revenge. Accused of having set Rome on fire himself, without any proof but the badness of his own character, he suborned persons to swear that the Christians were the true authors of the mighty conflagration, that, after raging six days, left him without a metropolis and the Romans without a home.”

“But how came he to lay the burning of Rome upon the Christians?” asked Bertha.

“Because the preaching of St. Paul had won from the paths of sin his favourite mistress and his cupbearer; at least, so the ancient traditions of the Church declare. They quitted their evil ways and were baptized; but the revenge of Nero sought not only their destruction, but that of the Christians with whom they had taken refuge. He hoped, by exhibiting them during the Saturnalia in the flaming tunic of the incendiary, to clear himself from the imputation of a crime he had never committed. But even the prejudiced heathen could not be convinced of the emperor’s innocence or the Christians’ guilt. They were acquitted by the voice of the public; ‘For humanity itself,’ remarks Tacitus, ‘relented in favour of the Christians.’

“It was during this short but dreadful persecution that St. Peter was crucified in the Circus Maximus, and St. Paul was beheaded in the Ostian Way. A small church, dedicated to St. Peter, afterwards was erected by the Emperor Constantine on the spot where this zealous and affectionate disciple suffered. This has been replaced by the most magnificent Christian temple in the world.

“The church of St. Paul also marks the spot of the martyrdom of the apostle of the Gentiles, and there can be no historic doubt that the remains of these holy men rest within the temples that bear their names. St. Paul’s Roman citizenship preserved him from the cruel cross, but not from the lictor’s axe. Thus Christmas should be doubly hallowed to us, not only as the nativity of ‘that blest babe who did redeem our loss,’ but also as that period in which the two great apostles and their converts fought under the banner of their crucified Lord, won the victory, and gained their martyr crowns in the stronghold of Satan—the great metropolis of the Gentile world.”

[2]	Chiule, the long ship of the Saxon pirate was so called.

[3]	In Charles the Second’s time.