Neatly every festival is commemorative of some religious, political, or social event. Every country celebrates these occasions, but' we seriously doubt when ther the people of every nation can explain the primary signification of their feast days. The ignorance of this seems to proceed in a'geometric ratio with the length of the nation's history. Few, if apy, Chinese know what their festivals represent. The long unbroken course of Chinese history is choked with legends, and crammed with Buddhist superstitions. Parasitic myths, that have. grown with mushroom rapidity, cling in diasters: like pestilent vermin around the body historic, and suck it "dry of its true import to fatten their own baleful organisms. What, for instance, did the feast of the Winter Solstice mean to the Chinese at first, and what does it mean now?
Christmas ought to be the festival of the federation of man. The reader knows the original purport of this day. Our history is 2s clean of myths as a hound's tooth is of tartar; every Englishman can tell the truth about the joyful twenty-fifth of December; and yet, in the very face of these facts, there are many who signalise this day in such a manner that these untutored heathen would suppose that instead of the Holy Jesus, some incarnate devil had been born into the world to bring dishonour to God in the Highest, discord on earth, and ill-will towards men. The writer of these lines once spent a winter in a large Chinese city, where there were no other foreigners. The primary object of his residence there was to make known the true author of our Christmas, but two hours a day were spent teaching English literature to a very promising class of mandarin's sons. On Christmas day the young Chinese found written on the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.