Christmas, all over the civilized world, is not only a period of festive reunion, but, according to the only rational interpretation of the word, a time of good will towards men, and peace upon earth. Photographers, like other men, have had their little differences of opinion, which have produced partial estrangements during a portion of the year which will so soon expire; but let the approaching season, which is held in commemoration of the birth of the greatest Peacemaker that ever came among men, be looked upon by all as the fittest time to forget and forgive all slights, injuries, or insults, real or imaginary; and let not the great festival of our common faith be clouded or eclipsed by an angry thought, nor the immeasurable charity of true Christianity be dimmed by one unforgiving feeling. The light of the Christian faith is a light that should penetrate to the dark cells of our hearts, and dispel all the gloomy and corrosive accumulations of controversy that may have lodged there, and unconsciously eaten away any part of our better nature. Few of us--none but the most presumptuous--can lay his hand upon his heart and say, "Mine is immaculate!" None of us are without sin, and charity and forgiveness are the greatest of the Christian virtues; and they should be the more carefully studied and practised by all who live in and by the Light of the world.
Everyone must be sensible of the many and varied applications of photography. Even photographers themselves, familiar as they are with the capabilities of the art they practise, must necessarily have their wonder excited occasionally at the scope of their art-science, especially when they consider that the process, as practised at the present day, is not more than seventeen years old. That it should be the historian of the life and manners of the present period more fully and faithfully than any written account, is not so much a matter of surprise. Appealing, as it does, to the vanity and affections of the people, it is at once a recorder of the changes of fashion, a registrar of marriages, births, and deaths, and a truthful illustrator of the times in which we live; but that it should be brought to bear upon the past, and make the inhabitants of the world in the nineteenth century familiar with the forms, fashions, manners, life, and death of the people of the first century of the Christian Era, is something to be marvelled at, and at first seems an impossibility. Yet such is the fact; and photography has been made the cheap and easy means of informing the present generation of the manner in which the ancients behaved, suffered, and died in the midst of one of the most appalling catastrophes that ever overtook the inhabitants of any part of the world, ancient or modern, as vividly and undeniably as if the calamity had occurred but yesterday.