To be honest, to be kind—­to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation—­above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—­here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.  He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.  There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert:  whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.  It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.  Here is a pleasant thought for the year’s end or for the end of life:  Only self-deception will be satisfied, and there need be no despair for the despairer.

II

But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us to thoughts of self-examination:  it is a season, from all its associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of joy.  A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to sadness.  And in the midst of the winter, when his life runs lowest and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face.  Noble disappointment, noble self-denial are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness.  It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim yourself and stay without.  And the kingdom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure.  Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns, the shame were indelible if we should lose it.  Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.  And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one nor other.  It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with.  If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong.  I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

A strange temptation attends upon man:  to keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not share in them; to aim all his morals against them.  This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age.  I venture to call such moralists insincere.  At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic—­envy, malice, the