THE ORIGIN OF HOLIDAYS. 523 



serious. Thus it came to pass that religion and the Church 

 appropriated so many of Nature's festivals ; that the Roman Sa- 

 turnalia became our precious Christmas, the full-moon sj^ring 

 equinoctial feast grew into our beautiful Easter, and the harvest 

 feast took the form of a Thanksgiving servipe. 



These changes suggest the function and future of holidays in 

 the light of their origin. As shown above, the psychical growth 

 of man from an emotional to an intellectual creature has almost 

 entirely changed the function of holidays. The truest survivals 

 of the primitive emotional reflex-action function is seen in the 

 children's April-fool's-day and our modern wedding shows. But 

 the element of association, which was the genesis of our periodic 

 days, is of more lasting power. The intense rush and struggle for 

 existence of the modern world found less time for occasional fes- 

 tivals, and so needed more of the periodical reminders of events 

 which our fathers or our ancestors first celebrated. But we note 

 now an appearance of decadence which seems inevitably to await 

 holidays. The original cause for the day being forgotten, from 

 being a day of amusement, joy, and gayety, set apart in honor of 

 some person or in commemoration of some event, it became a con- 

 secrated day, a religious anniversary or national festival, until it 

 acquired the modern distinctive characteristic of a day of exemp- 

 tion from labor. To be sure, a feast always necessitated a change 

 from ordinary occupations, but this was only an incidental condi- 

 tion to the expression of emotion. This function of a " rest-day " 

 came into prominence, as we have noticed, with the Accadians 

 and Babylonians, but it naturally has only become predominant 

 in a pre-eminently industrial age. For the sake, then, of incul- 

 cating Mr. Spencer's text, " Work to live, and not live to work," if 

 for nothing else, holidays still have a claim to our support ; and 

 we as a people are not so far removed from barbarism but that 

 such wholesome texts and demands, even of nature, come to us 

 more imperatively and efficiently in the guise of custom or in the 

 name of religion. So, though our national holidays are fast losing 

 their original meaning, and though church-days, and particularly 

 Sunday, tend to become secularized, let us hold to them, under 

 whatever form or sanction, for the sake of their modern function. 



Are we, then, ultimately to lose holidays ? Not to be too confi- 

 dently prophetic, but judging by the historical tendency, we 

 would answer, " Yes " and " No " — yes, as to the distinctive calen- 

 dar demonstrative days. With the decadence of the emotional 

 function, however, we found that the function of suggestion of 

 deep feeling and many-sided thought remained and increased. 

 Because our sensations mean more to us, because the thousand 

 and one phenomena of our daily life are arranged and related in 

 most delicate articulation, because emotional life will always live 



