truth, that happiness consists in making others happy. No cloister for
idle genuflections and bead counting, no hair-cloth for the loins nor
scourge for the limbs, but works of love and usefulness under the
cheerful sunshine, making the waste places of humanity glad and causing
the heart's desert to blossom. Why, then, should we go searching after
the cast-off sackcloth of the Pharisee? Are we Jews, or Christians?
Must even our gratitude for "glad tidings of great joy" be desponding?
Must the hymn of our thanksgiving for countless mercies and the,
unspeakable gift of His life have evermore an undertone of funeral
wailing? What! shall we go murmuring and lamenting, looking coldly on
one another, seeing no beauty, nor light, nor gladness in this good
world, wherein we have the glorious privilege of laboring in God's
harvest-field, with angels for our task companions, blessing and being
blessed?

To him who, neglecting the revelations of immediate duty, looks
regretfully behind and fearfully before him, life may well seem a solemn
mystery, for, whichever way he turns, a wall of darkness rises before
him; but down upon the present, as through a skylight between the
shadows, falls a clear, still radiance, like beams from an eye of
blessing; and, within the circle of that divine illumination, beauty and
goodness, truth and love, purity and cheerfulness blend like primal
colors into the clear harmony of light. The author of Proverbial
Philosophy has a passage not unworthy of note in this connection, when
he speaks of the train which attends the just in heaven:--

"Also in the lengthening troop see I some clad in robes of triumph,
Whose fair and sunny faces I have known and loved on earth.
Welcome, ye glorified Loves, Graces, Sciences, and Muses,
That, like Sisters of Charity, tended in this world's hospital;