Radio Script #7
Little talk On Common Things
December 26, 1948
Among the season’ s common things are Christmas trees. How they brighten the home and add to the holiday spirit! Did you ever hear of the Nation’ s Christmas Tree? Thirteen years ago the citizens of the little town of Sanger, California began what is now the annual custom of holding services at the foot of that particular tree.
Yesterday morning, in the chill mountain air of the High Sierras, the people trudged through the soft snow into the midst of the great, majestic redwood trees. At the foot of the tallest of them all they stopped, sang the old familiar Christmas carols, and held the beautiful Christmas service.
Why call it the Nation’s Christmas Tree? Because that giant redwood is probably the oldest living thing in the world. There, on the California mountainside, it had been standing more than 2,000 years before the angels sang the first carol to the shepherds tending their flocks near Bethlehem. Today that tree towers 300 feet above the forest floor, and its base covers as much space as a five-room house. It is a living symbol — is that ancient tree — of enduring strength and beauty that while many things pass away, while man’s own life on earth is of few years and full of sorrow, there are things that last a long I long time — and one of those things is the wonderful spirit of Christmas. The giant redwood in the High Sierras is indeed the Nation’s Christmas Tree.
Some of our listeners have expressed an interest in words, so let us take just a couple of minutes tonight on some unusual word origins. Did you know that alimony can be called literally a “meal ticket”? The word comes from the Latin alimonia, meaning nourishment or sustenance. The husband was expected to continue feeding the estranged wife, providing her with maintenance or alimonia. A bonfire is not a good fire; it has nothing to do with the French word bon.In the Middle Ages funeral pyres for human bodies were a necessity in emergencies of war or pestilence. They were called bone fires, fires of bones. Later, when it became the custom to burn heretics at the stake, the same name was applied. It was a bonefire that caused the death of Joan of Arc. In time, as the name was extended to many kinds of open air fires, it lost its old gruesome spelling, so that few people today realize the horror it once implied.
When we say a person is not worth his salt, we mean not worth his pay. There was a time when salt was a very scarce necessity. Roman soldiers, for instance, drew a special allowance for the purchase of salt. This salarium, or salt money, gives us our word salary.
This is the Yuletide season, for centuries in England the season of the great Yule log and its impressive ceremonies. Yuletide means a jolly time, for yule and jolly are the same word. The original word is lost in the mists of time, but in its middle English form Yol, from the older Anglo-Saxon geol, is akin to the modern Icelandic word jol, the midwinter feast of Iceland, going back to pre-Christian times on that ancient island. At any rate the word has always signified jolly or merry.
Time plays strange tricks with some of our words. What possible connection can there be between hearse and rehearse? In Norman England, the word for harrow was herse. The triangular frame bearing three candles, used in Holy Week, was called a hearse, because it was shaped like a hazrow. Similar was the frame bearing candles under Which the coffin was set during funeral ceremonies. It was only another step to apply the word to the conveyance carrying the body from funeral to grave.
Another version has it that in rural England, the body was often carried in funeral procession on a real wooden harrow, because it was just the right shape to take the three sacred candles. At any rate in their origin hearse and harrow are the same word. Oh , yes, we started, didn’t we, by asking what is the possible relation between hearse and rehearse. It’s clear enough now, isn’t it? Rehearse, of course, is simply to harrow again.
In the midst of the Christmas season, with its abundance of gifts and its merry spirit, we don’t like to be reminded of unpleasant things. But food is a very common thing, one of life’s few absolute necessities. For several years careful students both of agriculture and of sociology have warned us that man is rapidly using up the world’s food supplies. Erosion carries away the thin layer of soil that grows his seed; wasteful methods pull the richness from the ground; and he has found only ineffective means to combat drought and flood. Meanwhile, in spite of war and pestilence, the world’s population keeps on increasing.
Now these warnings may be too alarming, and after a while we get used to the cry of “Wolf! Wolf! II But let us not forget the ending of the old fable. You will recall that finally the wolf did come and killed the flocks of the unheeding shepherds.
So we may give more than a casual ear to what the British Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, said last week. “The grim danger of starvation confronts the world today”, he said. “If the world starves, chaos and anarchy must follow. The countries of the world are so concerned with their national differences and conflicts, so afraid of the prospect of war. so burdened with military expenses, that they are paying almost no attention to the calamitous danger that confronts all the world — starvation. The most pressing problem in the world today is for a united, aggressive agricultural policy by all the nations.”
Books are .common things, and some of them are very important things. Tonight I want to tell you about a book that I hope many of you will have a chance to read. It can now be read only in a foreign language, not familiar to most people in Central Maine, but it is so important that it ought soon to be translated into English. This book is the work of a man who is now a citizen of Waterville. He is Dr. Ossip Flechtheim, assistant professor of history and government at Colby College, and a member of Justice Jackson’s staff at the famous Nuremburg trials.
Dr. Flechtheim I s book is a history of the Communist Party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. He traces clearly the development of the party during the First World War, and especially after the Russian Revolution. shows how it continuously undermined the work of Stresemann and the true believers in democracy, and how finally it too fell victim to the ruthless dictatorship of Hitler.
As one reads this carefully documented record of communism at work in another land, he cannot fail to be reminded of those trouble spots today where the hammer and sickle cast their shadows — of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, of Eastern Germany and France, especially of war-torn China. The same tactics of friendly infiltration, then espionage and terror, finally complete control. The last stage was not reached in Germany fifteen years ago terror got in the way– the Nazi Gestapo.
We are slow to learn from history, we human beings, but it is not the fault of patient research historians like Dr. Flechtheim. As another Waterville resident of a quarter century ago, Dr. J. William Black, used to say: “History is more than a record of the past. It is given to us that the lessons of the past may be applied to our present and future good.” How much history must we have before we can learn that the lesson of the Communist party in .every land, despite its high sounding, Marxian idealism, is a lesson of the terror that flyeth by night and the destruction that waste that noon-day?
How easily, even at Christmas time, we travel the road from Bethlehem to Bedlam — from Bethlehem, the symbol of peace and quiet and good will, to Bedlam, the symbol for noise and confusion and insanity. Can it be that you have never heard the origin of the word Bedlam? The word is itself a corruption of Bethlehem, an example of shortened pronunciation which is characteristically British. As the British say “Maudlin” College for what we would call Magdalene College, as they say Beecham for what we call Beauchamp, so in a special instance they came to call Bethlehem, Bedlam. In the 14th century, when the old priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem was already two hundred years old, that ancient London monastery came to be used as a hospital for the insane. Familiarly known as Bethlehem, the name was corrupted by popular usage to Bethlemi then to Bedlam.
The name came to be applied to all insane asylums in England, and those asylums were terrible institutions, far worse than those described in that powerful novel THE SNAKE PIT. Modern psychiatry was unknown. Those unfortunate folk lived in filth and squalor, in scenes of uproar and confusion — in a very bedlam.
Well, we have been through a week reverberating with the name of Bethlehem. “Little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.” And now we Ire at the threshold of a new year. Who will be master of 1949, the Prince of Bethlehem or the Prince of Bedlam?
That great Quaker neighbor of ours, Rufus Jones, once wrote a story that he called “The Shepherd Who Missed the Manger”. Eager to go with the other shepherds who saw the star and heard the angel voices in the sky, bidding them go to the child in the manger, this Shepherd went instead to his sick child at home a child stricken with infantile paralysis. Years afterward, the shepherd took this son, now grown to be a man, but still hopelessly crippled, to a house where a Galilean healer was speaking to the crowd. Unable to get anywhere near the preacher, the shepherd and his friends let the paralytic, on his mat, down through the skylight of the roof. They saw the stricken one rise at the Master’s bidding — rise and walk. But they saw more than that. They discovered that God is Father and Friend, forever seeking to bring men and women to Himself, and they heard the Master tell them to cease their fears and worries.
He assured them that, though confusion and bedlam were all about them, their souls could be at peace. The Kingdom of God, he said, will come as soon as the love and forgiveness, the unselfishness and the sacrifice that are the will of God become the will of men.
This was better than going with the other shepherds to the manger. That night, under the stars, the shepherd’s emotions had been stirred, but here was something more. Now his mind had been enlightened, his will had been changed. Though allover the earth there might still be anger and hate, vengeance and war, within the soul of the shepherd who had missed the manger there was peace, for he had become a man of good will. He lived not in bedlam, but in Bethlehem.
Year: 1948