This is Christian charity, and how rare, how very rare it is, we all know. In this practical country of ours, where possessing property and estate is so loved, and losing them so hated, the opposition to it is almost as strong as that to Christian purity in France. The _Saturday Review_ is in general respectful to religion, intelligent and decorous, in matters of literary and scientific criticism reasonable. But let it imagine property and privilege threatened, and instantly what a change! There seems to rise before one’s mind’s eye a sort of vision of an elderly demoniac, surrounded by a troop of younger demoniacs of whom he is the owner and guide, all of them suddenly foaming at the mouth and crying out horribly. The attachment to property and privilege is so strong, the fear of losing them so agitating. But the line of Jesus perpetually tends to establish itself, as I have said, independently of our wishes, and whether we will or no. And undoubtedly the line of Jesus is: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” In other words: “How hardly shall those who cling to private possessions and personal enjoyment, who have not brought themselves to regard property and riches as foreign and indifferent to them, who have not annulled self, and placed their happiness in the common good, make part of the ideal society of the future!” The legend of Christmas is a homage to the Christian virtue of pureness, and Christmas, with its miracle of the Incarnation, should turn our thoughts to the certainty of this virtue’s final victory, against all difficulties. And with the victory of this virtue let us associate the victory of its great fellow-virtue of Christian charity, a victory equally difficult but equally certain. The difficulties are undeniable, but here the signs of the times point far more to the emergence and progress of the virtue than to its depression. Who cannot see that the idea of the common good is acquiring amongst us, at the present day, a force altogether new? that, for instance, in cases where, in the framing of laws and in the interpretation of them by tribunals, regard to property and privilege used to be, one may say, paramount, and the idea of the common good hardly considered at all, things are now tending quite the other way; the pretensions of property and privilege are severely scrutinized, the claims of the common good entertained with favor. An acceleration of progress in the spread of ideas of this kind, a decline of vitality in institutions where the opposite ideas were paramount, marks the close of a period. Jesus announced for his own period such a close; a close necessitated by the emergence of the new, the decay of the old. He announced it with the turbid figures familiar through prophecy to his hearers’ imagination figures of stupendous physical miracle, a break-up of nature, God coming to judgment. But he did not announce under these figures, as our