h the night of space; assured indeed
that companionship and mutual understanding alone make the adventure
agreeable,--one sees in a flash that Christmas, whatever else it may be,
is and must be the Feast of St. Friend, and a day on that account
supreme among the days of the year.

* * * * *

The third and greatest consequence of the systematic cultivation of
goodwill now grows blindingly apparent. To state it earlier in all its
crudity would have been ill-advised; and I purposely refrained from
doing so. It is the augmentation of one's own happiness. The increase of
amity, the diminution of resentment and annoyance, the regular
maintenance of an attitude mildly benevolent towards mankind,--these
things are the surest way to happiness. And it is because they are the
surest way to happiness, that the most enlightened go after them. All
real motives are selfish motives; were it otherwise humanity would be
utterly different from what it is. A man may perform some act which will
benefit another while working some striking injury to himself. But his
reason for doing it is that he prefers the evil of the injury to the
deeper evil of the fundamental dissatisfaction which would torment him
if he did not perform the act. Nobody yet sought the good of another
save as a means to his own good. And it is in accordance with common
sense that this should be so. There is, however, a lower egotism and a
higher. It is the latter which we call unselfishness. And it is the
latter of which Christmas is the celebration. We shall legitimately bear
in mind, therefore, that Christmas, in addition to being the Feast of
St. Friend, is even more profoundly the feast of one's own welfare.

NINE

THE REACTION

A reaction sets in between Christmas and the New Year. It is inevitable;
and I should be writing basely if I did not devote to it a full chapter.
In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption
of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and
we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and
the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only
true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five.
What is he thinking as he lounges about on the day after Christmas?

His thoughts probably run thus: "Even if I live to a good old age,
which is improbable, as many years lie behind me as before me. I h