customs, apt to produce annoyance in the breasts of the unsentimental,
are accepted with indulgence, even with eagerness, because their
symbolism also is shown in a clearer light. Christmas becomes as
personal as a birthday. One eats and drinks to excess, not because it
is the custom to eat and drink to excess, but from sheer effervescent
faith in an idea. And as one sits with one's friends, possessing them in
the privacy of one's heart, permeated by a sense of the value of
sympathetic comprehension in this formidable adventure of existence on a
planet that rushes eternally through 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