When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don’t think you quite liked the saying.  It gave you a little shiver.  It seemed rather grimly fantastic.  But do you not begin to see what I meant?  Begin to see the comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between Christmas and the ghost-story?  Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse.  Our realities can exist only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and the dead—­who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought near.

I have a friend who is dead—­but I say to myself that he is in New Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem less distant, or be in more frequent communication.  We should say that we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between us there was no need of words, that we both “understood.”  That is what I say now.  It is just as appropriate.  Perhaps he says it too.  And—­we shall meet by the Christmas fire.

I have a friend who is alive.  He is alive in England.  We have not met for twelve years.  He never writes, and I never write.  Perhaps we shall never meet, never even write to each other, again.  It is our way, the way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence—­friendship by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence.  My dead friend is not more dumb, not more invisible.  When these two friends meet me by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts—­both, in a sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive?

It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which it is the church’s meaning to convey by this festival of “peace and good-will to men”—­the power of the Invisible Love; from the mystical love of God for His world, to the no less, mystical love of mother and child, of lover and lover, of friend and friend.

And, when you think of it, is not this festival founded upon what, without irreverence, we may call the Divine Ghost-Story of Christmas?  Was there ever another ghost-story so strange, so full of marvels, a story with so thrilling a message from the unseen?  Taken just as a story, is there anything in the Arabian Nights so marvellous as this ghost-story of Christmas?  The world was all marble and blood and bronze, against a pitiless sky of pitiless gods.  The world was Rome.  No rule ever stood builded so impregnably from earth to stars—­a merciless wall of power.  Strength never planted upon the earth so stern a foot.  Never was tyranny so invincibly bastioned to the cowed and conquered eye.

And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic attack is this?  What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets catch the setting sun?