John Bunyan.
Be Useful
Be useful where thou livest, that they may
Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still.
——Find out men's wants and will,
And meet them there. All worldly joys go less
To the one joy of doing kindnesses.
George Herbert.
INTERLEAVES
The Glad Evangel
When the Child of Nazareth was born, the sun, according to the Bosnian legend, "leaped in the heavens, and the stars around it danced. A peace came over mountain and forest. Even the rotten stump stood straight and healthy on the green hill-side. The grass was beflowered with open blossoms, incense sweet as myrrh pervaded upland and forest, birds sang on the mountain top, and all gave thanks to the great God."
It is naught but an old folk-tale, but it has truth hidden at its heart, for a strange, subtle force, a spirit of genial good-will, a new-born kindness, seem to animate child and man alike when the world pays its tribute to the "heaven-sent youngling," as the poet Drummond calls the infant Christ.