oor; that where we thought to be impoverished we were enriched. The
world is built upon a lovely plan if we take time to study the
blue-prints of the heart.

Humanity must be forgiven much for having invented Christmas. What does
it matter that a great poet and philosopher urges "the abandonment of
the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy"?
Theology is not saddled upon pronouns; the best doctrine is but three
words, God is Love. Love, or kindness, is fundamental energy enough to
satisfy any brooder. And Christmas Day means the birth of a child; that
is to say, the triumph of life and hope over suffering.

Just for a few hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day the stupid,
harsh mechanism of the world runs down and we permit ourselves to live
according to untrammeled common sense, the unconquerable efficiency of
good will. We grant ourselves the complete and selfish pleasure of
loving others better than ourselves. How odd it seems, how unnaturally
happy we are! We feel there must be some mistake, and rather yearn for
the familiar frictions and distresses. Just for a few hours we "purge
out of every heart the lurking grudge." We know then that hatred is a
form of illness; that suspicion and pride are only fear; that the
rascally acts of others are perhaps, in the queer webwork of human
relations, due to some calousness of our own. Who knows? Some man may
have robbed a bank in Nashville or fired a gun in Louvain because we
looked so intolerably smug in Philadelphia!

So at Christmas we tap that vast reservoir of wisdom and strength--call
it efficiency or the fundamental energy if you will--Kindness. And our
kindness, thank heaven, is not the placid kindness of angels; it is
veined with human blood; it is full of absurdities, irritations,
frustrations. A man 100 per cent. kind would be intolerable. As a wise
teacher said, the milk of human kindness easily curdles into cheese. We
like our friends' affections because we know the tincture of mortal acid
is in them. We remember the satirist who remarked that to love one's
self is the beginning of a lifelong romance. We know this lifelong
romance will resume its sway; we shall lose our tempers, be obstinate,
peevish and crank. We shall fidget and fume while waiting our turn in
the barber's chair; we shall argue and muddle and mope. And yet, for a
few hours, what a happy vision that was! And we turn, on Christmas Eve,
to pages which those who speak