Now Saint Nicholas, also, in former times used to ride abroad on an ass, and still continues to do so in certain portions of Europe. In fact, as already noted, all the genial traits of Silenus, save only that of drunkenness, are reproduced in Santa Klaus,--the jolly pagan who is to-day the personification of Christmas. But though a modernized pagan god holds this important position in our festival, everything that could be offensive in the old pagan way of celebrating it has been abolished. [Illustration: Santa Claus and his young friends. From Thomas Nast’s “Christmas Drawings for the Human Race.” Copyright 1899 by Harper and Brothers.] It was not always so. The Church which so wisely sought to retain the old heathen forms, found it often very hard, and sometimes impossible, to subdue the heathen spirit. In spite of the protests of priests and the anathemas of popes, in spite of the condemnation of all wise and good men, Christians in the early days frequently reproduced all the worst follies and vices of the Bacchanalia and the Saturnalia. Even the clergy were for a period whirled into the vortex. A special celebration, called the Feast of Fools, was instituted in their behalf with a view, said the doctors of the Church, that “the folly which is natural to and born with us might exhale at least once a year.” The intention was excellent. But in practice the liberty so accorded speedily degenerated into license. Early in the history of the Church excesses were so great that a council of bishops held at Auxerre was moved to inquire into the matter. Gerson, the most noted theologian of the day, made an immense sensation by declaring that “if all the devils in hell had put their heads together to devise a feast that should utterly scandalize Christianity, they could not have improved upon this one.” If even among the clergy heathen traditions survived so strenuously, what wonder that they survived among the laity? The wild revels, indeed, of the Christmas period in olden times almost stagger belief. No amount of drunkenness, no blasphemy, no obscenity was frowned upon. License was carried to the utmost limits of licentiousness. Even in the seventeenth century, when the revels had been slightly toned down, Master William Prynne discovered in them those vestiges of paganism which are apparent enough to the historian of to-day. “If we compare,” he says in his _Histrio-Mastix_, “our Bacchanalian Christmas and New Year’s tides with these Saturnalia and feasts of Janus, we shall find such near affinity between them, both in regard of time,--they being both in the end of December and the first of January--and in their manner of solemnizing--both being spent in revelling, epicurism, wantonness, idleness, dancing, drinking, stage-plays, masques and carnal pomp and jollity--that we must conclude the one to be but the ape, or issue, of the other.”