that the brief, poignant and precious sweetness of the experience claims us at the full.  Then we can see that all our careful wisdom and shrewdness were folly and stupidity; and we can understand the meaning of that Great Surprise—­that where we planned wealth we found ourselves poor; 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 our tongue immortally associate with the season—­the pages of Charles Dickens.  Love of humanity endures as long as the thing it loves, and those pages are packed as full of it as a pound cake is full of fruit.  A pound cake will keep moist three years; a sponge cake is dry in three days.