CHARLES DICKENS’ books are not the gospels, of course, but his Christmas stories are worth reading again at this time of the year. A Christmas Carol exhibits the spirit of an English Christmas, perhaps more perfectly than anything in our literature.

It is up there in lights with Christina Rossetti’s exquisite poem, In the Bleak Midwinter.

Here, according to GK Chesterton, is tribute to how beautifully Dickens captures this season of the year: “Amid the white cities of Tuscany, Dickens hungered for something romantic, and so he wrote about a rainy Christmas in the East End of London. With the exquisite pictures of the Uffizi around him he starved for something beautiful – so he fed his memory on a London fog.”

I was five years old when I was terrified by my first reading of A Christmas Carol. My auntie Doris gave me the book for a present and it had frightening pictures. Marley’s ghost and the ghost of the Christmas-yet-tocome had me hiding my head under the sheets.

It has many memorable phrases: “Jacob Marley was dead as a doornail” and the sardonic, miserly line about Christmas as “…no excuse for picking a man’s pocket once a year”. Of course, A Christmas Carol is toecurlingly sentimental – but so is the rest of Dickens’ output. Think only as far as all that schmaltz about Little Nell or the hideously philanthropic Brownlows in Oliver Twist.

But there are no writers without their faults, and Dickens’ virtues far exceed his infelicities.

In A Christmas Carol he reminds us that the spirit of Christmas is charity.

Dickens was not a Christian but a sentimental, paternalistic socialist of the Lady Bountiful sort.

However, his insight into the soul of the repentant Mr Scrooge far exceeds that limitation – even if the incidents involving the crippled child Tiny Tim lure him to pen some of the most maudlin purple passages in the English language. He understood only too well our emotional incontinence – the outward and visible sign of our universal hypocrisy–- and how so many of us love nothing better than a good cry.

But to come back to that most excellent gift of charity. Here we find a word much-misunderstood.

There is that cruel phrase, “as cold as charity”. But the original meaning of the word was the very opposite. In Latin “caritas”

and in ancient Greek “agapay”, charity was all about warm-heartedness and, as it is sometimes said, with a hint of mischief, about “a fellow-feeling in the bosom”.

For Aristotle the greatest virtue was courage, but for St Paul that accolade was given to charity. Charity is that sublime empathy which – only rarely for sinners such as me – encourages us to understand that others have feelings as we do, and even enables us to enter into those feelings and respond in a way that is truly heartfelt. The Danish philosopher and mystic Soren Kierkegaard said: “Most people are objective towards others and subjective towards themselves. Our task is to become objective towards ourselves and subjective towards our neighbour.”

Charity is the light that shineth in darkness and our darkness comprehendeth it not.

Charity is what covers the multitude of sins.

That is the spirit of Christmas when “…the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory – the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”. It was enough to make even Dickens exclaim: “God bless us every one.”

A Happy Christmas one and all.