of as illuminating the lives of those better off than they! A large part of the happiness or unhappiness of life, I think, is gathered round experiences like this; and some of the greatest evils spring out of indifference, thoughtlessness, selfishness, on the part of the rich, and perhaps indifference, thoughtlessness, selfishness, again, on the part of the poor. For I am not one of those who think that every rich man is bad and got his money dishonestly, and every poor man is a victim. It is very much the same human nature in both the rich and the poor; and it is many a time a difference of circumstance only, a difference of opportunity that nobody is to take any credit for, or a difference of natural endowment that fitted one man to earn money, while the other may have splendid faculties for doing other kinds of work. But the evils, the unhappiness, the wrongs, on both sides might be almost entirely cured by the existence of a positive, earnest, active good will on both sides. Let those in the different classes try to understand each other, try to recognize the common basis of human nature and human wants and human hopes and human aspirations underlying all classes of society. I do not wonder that the poor sometimes feel a bitter rebellion in their hearts, not of necessity because some other man has more than they, but because of the spirit which the rich man shows and the way in which he spends his money. Look at a picture like that in France in the last days of the old régime, before the Revolution, when the nobility rode down the poor on the streets as though they were wild beasts, frequently not stopping in their luxurious equipages to find out whether they had maimed or killed any one. It did not matter one way or the other to them; for they had come to look upon themselves as another order of beings. From their calm Olympian heights, the ordinary run of mere human cattle had no legitimate claims upon them. There is a tendency always among those who climb up to forget those that have not succeeded in climbing, and to look down upon them and think it was their fault, and that they themselves have some peculiar kind of virtue different from ordinary human nature.

Take the case of those millionaires in this country who every little while snap their fingers in the faces of the masses of the people, and ask them what they are going to do about it, saying that they propose to do as they please, who express a good deal more forcibly than kindly their contempt for public opinion. It is these things that make it hard for those who are beneath to bear the arrogance, the ill-nature, the ill-temper, the contempt, of those that they know are not only no better than they, but perhaps not so good, their not so good being illustrated by the means by which they have climbed. These are legitimate grievances on the part of the poor; and any quantity of the bitter discontent of society is to be traced right here, right to the doors of the thoughtlessness, the selfishness, the wilfulness, the arrogance, of those who owe good will to men.

A similar truth might be wrought out concerning the relation between employer and employed. How many times, when there is a bitter dispute, is there a loving, earnest, persistent, faithful, patient attempt at the exercise of a good will that seeks not to get the advantage, but to find the just and fair solution of the difficulty? I do not say the blame is more on one side than the other: I only say that here as elsewhere the exercise of the positive Christmas good will might find the way to peace on earth. As I said at the outset, nearly all the evils of the world are to be traced to this want of good will.

What would be left? Many of the sicknesses, the pains of the world, that are looked upon as a part of the order of Providence, are simply the inherited results of the evil wills of the past. Good will might diminish the number of diseases, and lessen the severity of them in almost all cases. Good will would not abolish death; and I do not believe that a wise good will would seek to. But it might strip it of most of its terrors. Good will among men is the power which is to bring about the kingdom of God.

Now, what stands in the way? Why is it that there is so little comparatively of this human good will? You know I

believe that we are descended from the lower forms of life on this earth, and we have still uneliminated in us no end of the animalism, passion, and selfish greed that seeks simply for that which seems to be the present advantage. There is the serpent, the hyena, the bear, the tiger, still uneliminated in human nature. There is, then, at the root of this evil will this one fact of selfishness. Does not that explain it all? But selfishness is frequently misconceived. I have attempted from this place more than once to define it. I find that common ideas concerning it are so confused that I may be obliged to define it a good many times more. A man is not selfish who desires things. It makes no difference what he desires or how much he desires. That is not selfishness. Trace the growth of life from the lowest forms up, and how do they grow? How does anything grow? Simply by feeding. The basis of all life is hunger. Hunger means the desire for food. Food is the condition of growth. If I desire anything, it is simply the natural hunger of a certain faculty for what in itself is probably perfectly legitimate. There is no harm, then, in hunger, in desire. Every single desire of the nature, physical, mental, moral, spiritual, is in itself natural, and not wrong.

But let us consider an individual for a moment. He is made up of certain faculties and powers. Suppose you overfeed the lower part, you turn him into an animal, while you starve the heart, the brain, the spiritual nature. Suppose you overfeed the intellect, and you may starve the body and the affectional and the spiritual nature; for a man may be as inhuman through an overdevelopment of the brain as in any other way. Suppose you overfeed and stimulate the affectional nature, and the man is all effusiveness. You may in that way starve the brain and the spiritual nature. Or you may overdevelop the spiritual nature until the man flees into the desert for the sake of becoming a saint, but starves his brain and neglects all the claims of his fellow-men upon him. While, then, all these desires are legitimate and right, there needs to be proportion, wisdom, exercised in regard to feeding them.

Then, when you regard each man as only a part of the larger organism that we call society, some one man may be overfed, overdeveloped, at the expense of others, just as a tree which gets a start in the forest may drink in all the sunshine, and, stretching out its limbs, shadow and dwarf and kill the growths beneath it. In order that there shall be a perfect individual, each faculty and power must be fed and developed in due proportion. In order that there may be a perfect society, each member should be fed and developed in proportion and in perfect relation to the rest. Selfishness, then, in the evil sense, is my grasping what I want without caring whether I help you or not. If I grasp everything in the universe that I want, and obtain everything without injury to anybody else, I may not be selfish: I might be doing no harm. Selfishness is injuring other people. for the sake of what seems to me a personal advantage. The root, then, of this evil will is selfishness.

Now, what is the root of selfishness. I have intimated that it is this natural hunger which is necessary to growth; but I want to suggest to you another point,- that selfishness may not only be evil, but that it is the supreme folly of the world. The root of selfishness, then, when you analyze it, is ignorance. It is the mistaken supposition, mistaken from first to last, that any one soul or body or brain or heart, that any one individual, can be happy alone without any regard to the relation in which it stands to other people. By as much as you become ideal in your own development, by so much you will learn that you not only depend on other people for the highest, finest, sweetest happiness of life, but that you cannot be completely happy until all men are happy. You may be as supercilious as you please, may arrogate to yourself as much as you please, but you can never be quite at peace or happy unless the rest of society is content and at peace. Here we are disturbed by a century-long injustice towards a few Indians on the borders of the country. See this whole country, with all its money, its brains, its highly cultivated life, facing the problem of what to do with the colored people of the South, and learning that until we settle

that problem right we cannot be happy or at peace. So we are receiving object lessons at every turn, teaching us that we cannot possibly live alone. The only way to be selfishly happy is to learn not to care, to become less and less sensitive to pain. But one who becomes insensible to pain at last loses the possibility of happiness. He becomes insensible to that also. Then read history. It is curious, it is divine, to note that women like Dorothea Dix and Florence Nightingale and men like Howard, who have taken the sorrows of the world on their hearts and given themselves to måke the burden of the world a little lighter than it is, forgetting all about being happy, have found the secret of the truest joy. I do not believe there is a prince or a king or a millionaire on the face of the earth that ever tasted such

joy as did Dorothea Dix, or as did Howard. It is they who have learned the divineness of sympathy, whose brows have caught and reflected the light of the smile of some one smiling through tears which they have helped to brush away, it is souls like these that have learned the secret of joy.

And now, at the end, let us remember that this good will that we have been talking about, this positive force, is identical with God's will; for when you have discovered the conditions of happiness and welfare for somebody else, for the world, you have discovered the nature of things, the constituent laws of the natural life of the world. You have found God's law, that is all. And finding and obeying and putting in practice human good will, which is the counterpart of God's will,- this brings the kingdom of God from heaven down to earth.

Father, let us consecrate ourselves this morning anew to this coworking with Thee which shall dry up the tears and dress the wounds and soothe the sorrows of mankind. Let us cultivate this good will to men which shall be the expression of that good will of heaven which chanted itself in the angel song, and predicted the coming of perfect peace and joy. Amen.