Our Saviour’s life and teaching afford so many interesting illustrations to Charles Dickens that our great difficulty, in the limited space to which we are now confined, is to make a good selection. Here is a sketch entitled “A Christmas Tree,” from one of his reprinted pieces, which contains this simple and beautiful summary of our Lord’s life on earth:—“The waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep! What images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on the Christmas Tree? Known before all the others, keeping far apart from all the others, they gather round my little bed. An angel speaking to a group of shepherds in a field; some travellers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a Baby in a manger; a Child in a spacious temple talking with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face, raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the opened roof of a chamber where He sits, and letting down a sick person on a bed with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude; again, with a child upon His knee, and other children round; again, restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant; again, dying upon a cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one voice heard, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” These passages, which are only a few out of a very much longer list that might be made, will be sufficient, we trust, to show how much our greatest living novelist is in the habit of going to the sacred narrative for illustrations to many of his most touching incidents, and how reverent and respectful always is the spirit in which every such illustration is employed. To think of Charles Dickens’s writings as containing no religious teaching, is to do them a great injustice. * * * * *