CHRISTMAS.

HAIL to Old Father Christmas! With memories of days long gone by, and customs forgotten, save as the curious records of a state of society which we cannot realise now, Christmas returns to us venerable and beloved-returns to recall and make fresh to our memories and hearts in this eager, worldly, panting age the joy that comes with the Saviour's presence, and was declared near nineteen centuries ago to listening, wondering shepherds, and to a heedless, preoccupied world, when the angelic choir chanted in the stillness of the night-watches, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill to men." Christmas never fails of a welcome, and awakens enthusiasm among people of all classes and ages. There are other days of celebration and commemoration which were for a time observed with great festivity which now pass unnoticed and unhonoured; but Christmas Day retains all its fascination for the imagination, and maintains its supremacy as the chief among all days given to holiday-making and festivity. It comes again to us in 1885, and all the community is on the tiptoe of expectation and preparation. The statesman, the merchant, the professional man, the labourer, the housewife, the schoolboy-all are conscious of a peculiar unhinging of the ordinary humdrum course of things that they, quite as a matter of course, account for by the fact that Christmas is close at hand. It is a wonderful spell that the season and the name cast over all Christendom, independent of locality and surroundings. In our old land Christmas Day was ever associated with frost and snow, and blazing log and smoking cheer, and fireside stories and household games. In new lands like those of Australasia it comes with summer heats and gossamer clothing, and picnic outings and pantings and perspirings; and lo! it is hailed as rapturously there as here, and here as there!

Christmas, then, owes not its influence and its charm to the season of the year, when it comes, for whether it is in midsummer or midwinter, Christmas is Christmas still. It is the commemoration day of God's love to man, and of the bond that unites every man to his brother man, as being joined to one great family, of whom the Head is God, and whose Elder Brother is the Christ. True, in the excitement and revelry of festive observances, the very origin and purpose of Christmas celebrations are frequently forgotten; and a strange anomaly is discovered, in that the very means used to celebrate the occasion are often contrary in character to that which may be fitly associated with our true conceptions of the grace of God in the gift of His Son to the world. Yet even in this may be discovered a tribute to the influence of

Christianity. Those who affect to deny, or who practically ignore, the direct claims of Christ, do in many ways unconsciously recognise those claims, and pay tribute to the very kingdom of which they suppose themselves independent. The very holiday that all classes keep (Friday, the 25th), and the jollity and folly with which it will be marred by some, will distinctly declare the influence that the Saviour's advent exercises in the national, social, and domestic life of the people, though they may be unconscious of it. The kingdom of Christ is more practically influential in a thousand ways than men suppose. The charity that this season never fails to evoke, and which happily inspires multitudes of those who make no profession of practical godliness, though it may be thought by some to be a mere instinct of humanity, is in truth a product of Christianity. Would that the authority of the Saviour's kingdom were more fitly and consciously accepted by men! But we cannot fail to rejoice in the evidences of its secret and unthought-of influence, even where a willing recognition is not intended. This Christmas tide the young will have their glee, and the old will recall their childhood, and live it o'er again; the poor will receive some gifts to make their lot less hard, and the rich will get a greater blessing from what they bestow than from what they keep. It will all be the fruit of that great love and greatest gift which the angel declared when he said, " Unto you is born this day a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." To be filled with, and to reciprocate the love which each will realise who personally accepts that wondrous gift, is the surest way to secure what we desire for all our readers-A HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

THE LATE LORD SHAFTESBURY.

THE noble Earl, whose death the whole of Christendom has so sincerely mourned, was doubtless, outside the muddy region of politics, the most popular man of his age. He was a "friend of the people," par excellence. He embodied in this life the sentiments expressed by a great writer: "To work worthily, man must aspire worthily. His theory of human attainment must be lofty. It must ever be lifting him above the plain of custom and convention, in which the senses confine him, into the high mount of vision and renovating ideas." He aspired to raise the fallen, to purify the social atmosphere, to remedy the numerous grievances with which the working classes bravely struggled, and to a high degree he succeeded. The juniors of the present generation are happily not old enough

to remember the time-not so long ago, by-the-bye-when, before the introduction of the School Board legislation, there were comparatively very few good schools for even the children of the middle classes, and working people had the greatest possible difficulty in getting any education at all for their sons and daughters. If this

were the case with even the better-paid artisan class, things were still worse in the social strata below them. In the back settlements of London, and the large provincial towns, thousands of untaught children, prematurely old-men of fourteen, women'of twelve-were to be found. Ragged and unwashed vagabonds, whose trade was

plunder, and amusements vice, were growing up by thousands. They were the modern Ishmaelites, their hand against every man, and every man's hand against them. Society felt the evil, but made very little effort towards remedying it. The higher and middle classes felt that they must protect themselves, and so these Ishmaelites, these offscourings of civilisation, these blighted creatures, must be looked after. The policeman must keep a sharp eye upon them, hunt them as wild beasts from court to alley, and from alley to court. They must be shut up in gaols; the lash, the solitary cell, and penal servitude in prospect, must awe them into virtue.

"These vagrant children," said the then social reformer, "must be put down, kept down, trampled down." These children of the dangerous classes were looked upon as useless, as so much waste in the onflowing tide of population. They were indeed the surplus population of the day; and the sooner all surplus and waste were removed the better. But happily there were a few clear-sighted men who could see a possible value in these children, and who, not only as philanthropists and Christians, but as political economists, dared to urge upon society the duty of superintending the welfare and alleviating the sorrows of these miserable outcasts. Lord Shaftesbury was among the earliest of this unselfish band. He sympathised deeply with these gutter-children. He could say, as Bailey in his "Festus " has sympathetically written :—

"It matters not how long we live, but how.
For as the parts of one manhood, while here,
We live in every age; we think, and feel,
And feed, upon the coming, and the gone,
As much as on the now time. Man is one,
And he hath one great heart. It is thus we feel,
With a gigantic throb athwart the sea,

Each other's rights and wrongs. Thus are we men."

Anthony Ashley Cooper, "saint, patriot, and philanthropist,” was born on April 28, 1801. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class in classics, in 1822. He graduated M.A. in 1832, and was created D.C.L. in 1841. In 1830 he married Lady Emily Cowper, by whom he had issue, six sons and four daughters. He was returned, as Lord Ashley, Member of Parliament for Woodstock in 1826. He was a supporter of the Governments of Lord Liverpool and Mr. Canning, and in the administration of the Duke of Wellington was a Commissioner of the Board of Control. He was returned for Dorchester in 1830, and for Dorsetshire County in 1881, which county he represented till February, 1846. In the latter year he resigned his seat, his constituents having expressed dissatisfaction with his

support of the repeal of the Corn Laws. He was, however, in August, 1847, elected as one of the members for Bath, and sat for that borough till he succeeded his father in the peerage in 1851. The late Earl was a Lord of the Admiralty in the late Sir Robert Peel's administration in 1834-5; and, on the removal from the House of Commons of the late Mr. Sadler, took charge of the Ten Hours' Bill. When Sir Robert Peel again took office, in 1841, Lord Ashley was invited to join the Cabinet, but refused upon finding that the Premier's views would not allow him to support the Ten Hours' Bill. The venerable Earl took a very prominent part in nearly all social and religious movements. He worked with all his power for the education and religious instruction of the children of the country. On the principle that prevention is better than cure, he devoted his energies to rescuing the children of the lower orders from the pernicious influences surrounding them, and his warm heart, cool head, and strong will made the Ragged School movement a power for good in the land. He did not wait for legislation on these matters, but long years before the present educational facilities had entered the region of practical politics, he worked, at times almost single-handed, as the leader of an army of rightminded, earnest men and women, to bless and save the thousands of the "gutter" children of our country. To him is due the credit of creating a medium of communication between the higher classes of society and what used to be considered the unapproachable classes. "Horrible London" was as familiar to him as the society of the aristocratic West; and the name of the then Lord Ashley was a household word in every neighbourhood where there was a school to be founded, a church to be helped, or a chapel to be opened. As one of his numerous biographers has said: Wearing a coronet first conferred upon his ancestor in the roystering days of the Second Charles, he has proved to the wealthier classes of the country the possibility of creating a line of that nobler nobility whose power shall be based upon their willingness to do the work of the Master amongst the poor and lowly, the suffering and the criminal. The influence of such a lifetime spent in practical philanthropy is almost unbounded. We recognise its consequences in the State-created system of public education, in the ever-increasing spread of temperance principles, in the growth of free libraries and of working men's clubs and institutes, and more lately in that widening glow of public sympathy with the miserable condition of the less fortunate members of the toiling classes which has resulted in the Royal Commission on the Dwellings of the Poor, with the Heir to the Throne himself as its President."

*

* This is a mistake; Sir C. Dilke was President.-ED.
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VOL. LXXXVIII.