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214 DAYS IN THE SUN
his own infallibility. And the Church does not create a
chasm between itself and him by persistently forcing
the conception of God upon him. The Church is dili-
gently engaged in the same task of depriving God of
his properties and applying them to extremely mun-
dane things—to images of the Pope and the Saints, to
old rags and bones.
The case with Christ is a little easier. At least
Christ was a man on earth and the story of his passion
can be made quite vivid with the use of wax figures or
living human beings. But the significance of Christ is
not overestimated either by the Church or by the peo-
ple. It is taken quite naturally. On Christmas eve we
visited the great Cathedral at Seville, believing that we
would find some celebration to mark the birth of
Christ. Up at the main altar a few men were working
on a scaffolding that would be needed during the fol-
lowing week on a certain Saint’s day. It was late in
the evening, but they were working overtime to finish
their job. Their hammer-blows reéchoed through the
dark vaults. On the pavement, a servant was carrying
two big pails of water, from which he was filling the
fonts of holy water. Any portion of the fluid that
overflowed was dried off with a dirty rag. I turned to
a priest who was walking through the church.
“Birth of Christ? No, we have nothing to do with
that,” he answered absent-mindedly. ‘‘You will have
to go to such and such a church.”
The people themselves of course were not so in-
different to the Nativity.
“Hello, it’s Christmas to-day. Everybody is going
to get a jag on to-day!” was what my acquaintances
shouted to me in the street; and when night came we
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