“My dear people,” he said, and the great physician’s voice was tender as if speaking to sick and fretful children, “my dear people, God hath afflicted you more sorely with this plague of witchery than with the Black Plague itself. Yet it lies with you to check this foul disease. The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ But it also commands, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ Abide by the latter injunction, that you save your souls from sin and let not your land run red with innocent blood. Let each one of you be so exalted in goodness that evil cannot enter into you. But, and my words on witchery impress you not, let me at least beseech you who are of man’s estate and have catched a child in sin, to remember that it but does as those around it, and is therefore to be dealt by tenderly. “And yet another subject am I driven to speak to you upon. “Mightily does it distress me that you do bring your children up in woeful ignorance of the Christmas-tide as we celebrate it in Merry England. ’Tis very dolorous that you should be so blinded as to think the proper observance of that Holy day bewrayeth a Popish tendency. Methinks it be a lack of good red blood that makes you all so sour and mealy-mouthed. Your Governor informs me that on that blessed day, sadly you wend your way to church, with downcast eyes as though you were sinners catched in naughtiness. There is great droning of psalms through your noses, which is in itself a sorry thing, and I doubt not, an unpleasant sound in the Lord’s ear. Whereas, in green old England, the little children carol all day long. But here not even your babes have sugar-plums. My stomach turns against you and your ways. How different is it in my castle across the seas! To the mantel above the blazing yule-log, my sweetest daughter pins her stocking. Outside, the snow snaps with the cold and the frost flowers whiten the window-pane. Then come the village lads and lassies singing, that we may open the window and fling out siller pieces, sometimes a bit of bright gold. “Lastly, at the chiming of the midnight bells, troop in my servant-men and wenches. One and all we drink the hot-spiced glee-wine my sweet Elizabeth makes in the silver wassail bowl. And to every man and maid I give a piece of gold. “I do beseech you, good people, to have remembrance after this, that Christmas is children’s day, and that to keep it with sadness and dolour, is an offence unto the Lord Christ, whose birth made that day, and who was said by those versed in wisdom, to have been when a child tender, holy, and gay, as it becometh all children to be. Therefore I would have you bestow these delights upon your children, for they are bowed by responsibilities beyond their years, and joy is checked in them, so that I oft catch myself sighing, for I have great pain not to see all children joyful and full of the vigour of life.