Paradoxes.

PARADOXES .

TX 7 "E are sometimes struck with the amount of " paradoxes , " harmless and ' » hurtful , amusing and foolish , which it is our lot to peruse , and which appear in variour forms and under different circumstances in many of our contemporaries of the serial and journalistic press day by day , week by week , month by month . Indeed , just now we appear to live in a perpetual atmosphere of paradoxesso to saywhich would be alarmingand even

, , , dangerous , to thought , progress , right reason , and true morality , if we did not also feel perfectly convinced that very few read them , much less understand them , and hardly any are influenced by them . The common theory of the influence of the press , as an institution , on the public mind is , we apprehend , exaggerated altogether in a remarkable manner , and just as sermons fly over the heads of the congregation to whom they are addressed

, and are lost in the " circumambient air , " so leaders and essays , if read , are hardly understood , aud if understood are looked on as a piece of free writing and nothing more . People are to write , and have to write , of course , whether for public amusement or private profit ; but what they say is after all onl y individual opinion at the best , probably not that of the wisest of men or the safest of connectionsand so it has and need have no practical

, effect either in the thoughts , words , or lives of strong-minded , thinking persons , though it may affect , ancl often does affect greatly the unthinking and the unreasoning . It is in this peculiarity of public opinion , such as it is , wherein lies our safety at the present hour . An article which the Times propounds as its No . 1 on Christmas Day , contains some of the most striking and even exhilarating paradoxes we have seen for some time , ancl as if the

article be accepted as the exposition of a real and actual state of feeling as regards Christmas generally , it might do some little harm , if , as we did before it was understood , we have thought it well to reproduce it in a great extent in our pages this month , for the purpose of pointing out such paradoxes which we may , and animadverting on views which are alike cynical and unsound . In the first lace the article begins with a morbid assertion about

p the "trouble" attendant upon Christmas , and the special difficulty we fear we have in preparing for it . We entirely dissent from both propositions . But let us listen , as in fairness we are bound to do , to our modern Diogenes preaching from his Tub in Printing House Square : —

" There is nothing without trouble , so said the old sages , and Christmas is no exception . Coming round by nature in one sense , it has to be made in another , and a great deal of making does it often require . It is the supreme effort aud last agony of the year . We have all to do our very best to be happy , and to make others happy , however adverse circumstances may be ; and , what is even move difficult , to bring ourselves round to the same standing point as last year aud all former years . Thanks to Gregory XIII . and our own tardier astronomical reformers , we may be sure that at noon on the 25 th of December we stand under the stars

same as ou the same day last year , or a century since , or nineteen centuries since , and that the sun rises and sets at the same points of mean time ; but everything else has changed , and continues to change . The great annual gathering of kinsfolk and friends is but the periodical muster-roll of an ever-raging battle , telling continually on life , fortune , all the vital powers , and all the ingredients and means of happiness . Every year return the questions who shall be asked , or where shall I dine , what new face here to-daywhat old face here There is not topic that has not The

, no more . a a new aspect . very talk of the boys from school or college—their books , their amusements , their slanghave all undergone a change . " We do not affect to deny the " platitudes " concerning change as year follows year . Of course things change , and the writer has evidently forgotten