The Christmas Thoughts of a Philisopher

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20995, 23 December 1939, Page 14 (Supplement)

The Christmas Thoughts of a Philisopher

The Lonely Hearts

There are not many worse things that can befall a person in this world than to be alone and unfriended, with people all about who are gaily busy about their own concerns. For all their pluck and cheerfulness

that hard luck cannot kill, many such persons are starving at ncart for companionship, and the iejoicmgs of the season can make their loneliness all the more desolating by bringing them remembrances of past Christmas joys and Happiness. A true and sure way to happiness at Christmas is to be found in taking thought for others, and especially the old, with whom life has not dealt kindly.

Merely an Emotion

Goodwill is something more than a mere emotion of benevolence. Good intentions are not likely to endure if their basis is merely an emotion. Men and women of goodwill are more than amiable, well-wishing persons. They are practical in their goodwill.

The Month of the Great Festival

When we were children day after day of December brought to our hearts an increasing glow of happy anticipation until on Christmas Eve it became a joy never to be forgotten. A* we grow older the passing years, with

their shadows as well as their sunshine, deepen for us our childhood memories of the warmth and love that made the great festival of the home the crowning event of the year. No words have such magic power as the words of the Christmas greeting have to rekindle old and happy memories, bringing cheerfulness and kindliness and goodwill and hope. What better could you have a friend wish you than that you be cheerful and radiate goodwill? What better can you wish a friend?

"All God’s Chillun’s Got Wings”

Once at Christmas a child thinking childishly about the angels singing of peace and goodwill from the sky—how different from broadcasts that have come across

the seas in recent months!—asked if angels really had wings ‘‘with feathers," and if he himself when he went to Heaven would grow wings. It is not easy to imagine yourself with wings. Only few of us can imagine ourselves much different from what we usually are, in circumstances much different from those in which we live. As for wings, they have always been the symbols of a free spirit. However much our appetites quarrel with our aspirations and our actions with our professions of belief, however much the free spirit may go blindly astray in darkness, even so far as to choose hatred instead of goodwill and so make evil its god, man the immortal has within him the sense of w’ings lifting him above his animal nature.