The Hope of Christmas By The Reverend Charles Templeton CHRISTMAS IS the symbol of hope. But has any hope ever seemed less likely to be fulfilled than the one which was born in Bethlehem that gray December night nearly 2000 years ago? How pathetically incongruous! A newborn infant proclaimed as a challenge to the sprawling might of the Roman Empire! The gentle Jesus pitted against Caesar! And yet, what of Caesar’s might today? His armies are history, his empire has crumbled, his influence is almost nil. But the things of which Jesus spoke - those intangible ideals, those words of hope - have outlasted the material world in which they were spoken and have grown stronger with every century. This is the ground for the hope that is born again each Christmas Day. How vain it sometimes seems to believe that love and good will can triumph over the organized hate and the evil power abroad in our world today. It seems such an unequal contest. How then, confronted with the grim reality of life in the atomic age, can we find hope in the lovely but seemingly outdated story of Christmas? Where do we begin? We begin where they began who gathered about the manger. Is our world troubled? So was theirs. We have so sentimentalized Christmas that we have little comprehension of the bloody, callous, violent time into which the Christ child was born. If the little group in the stable had looked at the ugliness and injustice that filled their world, they might well have cried in despair, “ Look what the world has come to!” Instead, they looked at the babe asleep in the straw and cried out, “Look what has come to the world” How can we echo this hope? How A REPRINT FROM THE READER’S DIGEST