It is not necessary to put a message like this into high-flown language, to swear absolute devotion and deathless consecration.  In love and friendship, small, steady payments on a gold basis are better than immense promissory notes.  Nor, indeed, is it always necessary to put the message into words at all, nor even to convey it by a tangible token.  To feel it and to act it out—­that is the main thing.

There are a great many people in the world whom we know more or less, but to whom for various reasons we cannot very well send a Christmas gift.  But there is hardly one, in all the circles of our acquaintance, with whom we may not exchange the touch of Christmas life.

In the outer circles, cheerful greetings, courtesy, consideration; in the inner circles, sympathetic interest, hearty congratulations, honest encouragement; in the inmost circle, comradeship, helpfulness, tenderness,—­

  “Beautiful friendship tried by sun and wind
  Durable from the daily dust of life.”

After all, Christmas-living is the best kind of Christmas-giving.

* * * * *

A SHORT CHRISTMAS SERMON

KEEPING CHRISTMAS

    Romans, xiv, 6:  He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto
    the Lord.

It is a good thing to observe Christmas day.  The mere marking of times and seasons, when men agree to stop work and make merry together, is a wise and wholesome custom.  It helps one to feel the supremacy of the common life over the individual life.  It reminds a man to set his own little watch, now and then, by the great clock of humanity which runs on sun time.

But there is a better thing than the observance of Christmas day, and that is, keeping Christmas.

Are you willing to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people have done for you; to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground; to see that your fellow-men are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness—­are you willing to do these things even for a day?  Then you can keep Christmas.