Lawrence D. Hogan is Professor of History at Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey.

"It could always be said of Ebenezer Scrooge that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man possessed the knowledge." Listen to a Christmas voice whose conversion from humbug-hurler to man of social conscience taught us presumably once and for all about the true meaning of the Christmas spirit.

Recall the scene in Dickens's A Christmas Carol where those engaged in caring for the unwanted in Ebenezer Scrooge's London are rebuffed by the miserable tightwad: "Let those poor go to the prisons and the Union workhouses," is Scrooge's reply to the plea for Christmas charity. "And if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

That Scrooge, wrote G.K. Chesterton in 1929, "utters all the sophistries by which the age of machinery has tried to turn the virtue of charity into a vice." And presciently pointing to where we are today, Chesterton went on to say that hardhearted Ebenezer belonged "not only to the hard times of the beginning of the nineteenth century, but to the harder times of the beginning of the twentieth century, and the yet harder times in which we live. Many amiable sociologists will say as he said, 'Let them die and decrease the population.' The improved proposal is that they should die before they are born."

That "improved proposal" has been adopted by the "amiable" members of our own society, as about 1.2 million legal abortions are performed yearly in the United States. We have eagerly em braced the abortion option, and I wonder if we realize the dangerous price we pay for that embrace. Astoundingly bad thinking and corrupt feeling are part of the price. Here is what social critic Nicholas von Hoffman says about the important social benefits of abortion. "At their demonstrations," von Hoffman writes, "the anti-abortionists parade around with pictures of dead and dismembered fetuses. The pro abortionists should meet these displays with some of their own: pictures of the victims of the unaborted - murder victims, rape victims, mutilation victims - pictures to remind us that the fight for abortion is but part of the larger struggle for safe streets and safe homes."

Let us consider that soberly: Some of the unborn babies who are aborted for the "good" of the mother, the "good" of the "unwanted" child, and the "good" of an overburdened society could, if born, turn out to be among the predators that von Hoffman worries about. Those are the types who fall into that category of human excess we frequently call the lower orders of society. So von Hoffman out-Scrooge ' s Scrooge: Let them die, and decrease the potential mugger population.

Ebenezer Scrooge, before his Christmas visit from Jacob Marley, would have signed onto the von Hoffman line. That unconverted Scrooge lurks in the hearts of all of us, all the time. And therein - within us - lies the awful danger we face in a country that calls abortion a right, celebrates in its law and politics the possession and exercise of that right, and seeks to encourage all who might want to use it to do so. The Scrooge of my rights not my responsibilities, of fear of life rather than joy in life's possibilities, orchestrates over a million preborn deaths per year. In so doing he feeds the smallness and inadequacy of spirit to which we are all tempted and which too frequently we embrace.

An iron law of human nature is operative here. What we do destructively in one area of our lives will be destructive in all areas. We cannot deny life to our unborn in the most painful of ways and on so large a scale and expect to be able to give our "wanted" children the sense that life is good and cries out to be lived. And the corollary to the iron law is that where we plan to stop with the consequences of our brutality is never where we can stop. Destructiveness has a logic of its own. Observe the presidential and gubernatorial vetoes of legislative bans on partial-birth abortion. Newspaper editorials ex press support of these vetoes. But why stop there? The logical next step is an editorial, reflective of where community sentiment ought to be led, supporting the right of a mother or father to choose to "abort" a child after birth. Certainly the health, mental as well as physical, of a mother and father can be seriously affected by having to care for and raise a child. If either parent judges such a responsibility to be too much to bear, something that might endanger the health of the mother, or for that matter might stress the father, what right does the state have to insist that the burden live?

Legal murder of the unborn baby just barely inside the womb must logically lead to legal murder of the infant just out of the womb. Infanticide, as well as abortion, ought to be seen as a cost-effective, even humane, way to thin the ranks of those dangerous lower-order types that are potentially a plague to society.

Overdrawn and unfair, you say. Perhaps. But then, perhaps not.

As children absorbing the Christmas message of a converted Scrooge whose "own heart laughed" at those who wondered about his newfound largeness of spirit, could we have imagined that in the Christmases of our adult years the old skinflint, Scrooge the unconverted, Ebenezer the niggardly of spirit, would command so much of our public life as he does today? Where in 1998 is the Ebenezer of whom "it could always be said that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man possessed the knowledge"?

This is what we must puzzle over "in the yet harder times in which we live today" - and this is what should fill us with foreboding for the harder times that could - indeed will - come if we do not reach for and make operative in our public life the best that is in each of us.

As the echo of the Christmas bells of 1998 fades into the cold air of January, we might pause a moment to think about the "good will to men" of Him Who - an endangered child Himself at this season - said when He was grown, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." What must He think of what we are doing to His children, His favorites? Our only hope is that He will look upon our routine murderousness and say, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

This not knowing what we do - and the inevitable not being able to stop where we think we can on the numerous roads we take to hell on earth - is perhaps best seen in comments from two of today's prochoice advocates who, when the abortion debate began, saw more clearly than they do now what is required of us, as well as the consequences in store if we fail to do what is right.

"The legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the values which our civilization places on human life. Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights that must be recognized - the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old." So wrote Senator Edward Kennedy in the early 1970s.

"What happens to the mind of a person and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of persons, and what kind of society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth." So preached the Rev. Jesse Jackson in January 1977.

For every Scrooge converted from selfishness, how many reverse conversions like these have we seen? People of prominence and influence "grow" and "evolve" so that, instead of leading us away from hell on earth, they confirm us in the self serving and self-indulgence that will lead us to it. Jacob Marley came up from hell, wreathed in chains, to warn Ebenezer Scrooge of his error and to soften his hard heart. Where is the warning which senators, reverends, and the rest of us might heed?

There is a voice that sounded loud in life and still sounds from beyond the grave, the voice of a woman now one year dead, who spent her life in loving service to the "surplus population" and the "lower orders." Mother Teresa has this warning for the Scrooge in all of us this Christmas: "If a mother can kill a child in her womb, then I can kill you and you can kill me."

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