The morning of Christmas day was fixed for the commencement of these outrages (in Scotland). For nothing disgusted the rigid Covenanter more than the reverence paid by the prelatist to the ancient holidays of the Church.
On Christmas day, therefore, the Covenanters held armed musters by concert in many parts of the western shires. Each band marched to the nearest manse, and sacked the cellar and larder of the minister, which at that season were probably better stocked than usual. The priest of Baal was reviled and insulted, sometimes beaten, sometimes ducked. His furniture was thrown out of the windows; his wife and children turned out of doors in the snow. He was then carried to the market place, and exposed during some time as a malefactor. His gown was torn to shreds over his head: if he had a prayer book in his pocket it was burned; and he was dismissed with a charge, never, as he valued his life, to officiate in the parish again. The work of reformation having been thus completed, the reformers locked up the church and departed with the keys.
The Puritan, who was, in general, but too ready to follow precedents and analogies drawn from the history and jurisprudence of the Jews, might have found in the Old Testament quite as clear warrant for keeping festivals in honour of great events as for assassinating bishops and refusing quarter to captives.
He certainly did not learn from his master, Calvin, to hold such festivals in abhorrence; for it was in consequence of the strenuous exertions of Calvin that Christmas was, after an interval of some years, again observed by the citizens of Geneva. But there had arisen in Scotland Calvinists who were to Calvin what Calvin was to Laud. To these austere fanatics a holiday was an object of positive disgust and hatred. They long continued in their solemn manifestoes to reckon it among the sins which would one day bring down some fearful judgment on the land that the Court of Session took a vacation in the last week of December,
Over 2500 years ago the cult worship of Baal had infected Israel and become the dominant belief system and worship practice amongst the people God called His own. In order to combat this distorted belief system God raised up the prophet Elijah to confront the false system of worship.
Despite Elijah’s singular victory over Baal at Mt. Carmel, Baal worship persisted through history as various cultures adopted Baal, changing his name to suit their time and place in history. Baal became Zeus to the Greeks, Jupiter to the Romans and Thor to the Germanic and Norse peoples, and with the conversion of Constantine Baal insidiously infected Christianity. God, through the prophet Malachi, foretold that before Christ returns the people of God would again, like Israel 3500 years ago, need the prophet Elijah to call them back to the worship of the true God.
“The Hebrew noun ba‘al means ‘master’, ‘possessor’ or ‘husband’. Used with suffixes, e.g. Baal-peor or Baal-berith, the word may have retained something of its original sense; but in general Baal is a proper name in the OT, and refers to a specific deity, Hadad, the W Semitic storm-god, the most important deity in the Canaanite pantheon.
Excerpt From
Thomas Babington Macaulay
“The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 3.”
I am forever reminded of the violence which derives from fiction, works of the imagination, fabrication. Whether it were children’s fables, traditional legends, historic myths or horror films, fiction is a double edged sword, the one side the assertive, the other side the objectionable. The two sides of contrary disposition play opposite one another, sometimes cruelly, far surpassing the wholly intellectual standards of debate. What however makes the debates more reprehensible is that the Motion before the House is akin to, “BE IT RESOLVED THAT Little Red Riding Hood is a sexual myth”. There is no more answer to such preposterous Motion than there is to the proper manner to eat a boiled egg as satirized in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745).
