As I sat in Charles Dickens house in London a few years back on Christmas day, I am reminded of the reading I heard from the lips of an Englishman on that magical day.

From “A Christmas Carol,” cheerful nephew Fred tells a bah-humbugging Ebenezer Scrooge that Christmas is “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Now that’s religion.