everish lips, and has for
its highest expression the eight beatitudes. It is because Christ is
an optimist that for ages he has dominated the Western world. For
nineteen centuries Christendom has gazed into his shining face and
felt that all things work together for good. St. Paul, too, taught the
faith which looks beyond the hardest things into the infinite horizon
of heaven, where all limitations are lost in the light of perfect
understanding. If you are born blind, search the treasures of
darkness. They are more precious than the gold of Ophir. They are love
and goodness and truth and hope, and their price is above rubies and
sapphires.

Jesus utters and Paul proclaims a message of peace and a message of
reason, a belief in the Idea, not in things, in love, not in conquest.
The optimist is he who sees that men's actions are directed not by
squadrons and armies, but by moral power, that the conquests of
Alexander and Napoleon are less abiding than Newton's and Galileo's
and St. Augustine's silent mastery of the world. Ideas are mightier
than fire and sword. Noiselessly they propagate themselves from land
to land, and mankind goes out and reaps the rich harvest and thanks
God; but the achievements of the warrior are like his canvas city,
"to-day a camp, to-morrow all struck and vanished, a few pit-holes and
heaps of straw." This was the gospel of Jesus two thousand years ago.
Christmas Day is the festival of optimism.

Although there are still great evils which have not been subdued, and
the optimist is not blind to them, yet he is full of hope. Despondency
has no place in his creed, for he believes in the imperishable
righteousness of God and the dignity of man. History records man's
triumphant ascent. Each halt in his progress has been but a pause
before a mighty leap forward. The time is not out of joint. If indeed
some of the temples we worshipped in have fallen, we have built new
ones on the sacred sites loftier and holier than those which have
crumbled. If we have lost some of the heroic physical qualities of our
ancestors, we have replaced them with a spiritual nobleness that turns
aside wrath and binds up the wounds of the vanquished. All the past
attainments of man are ours; and more, his day-dreams have become our
clear realities. Therein lies our hope and sure faith.

As I stand in the sunshine of a sincere and earnest optimism, my
imagination "paints yet more glorious triumphs on the cloud-curtain of
th