Published Every Wednesday & Saturday WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1880. Christmastide

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 906, 5 January 1881, Page 6

Published Every Wednesday & Saturday WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1880. Christmastide

We have looked carefully through our files, and have read, with much interest, the several articles appearing in them on the subject of the season’s festivities ; and without the slightest flattery, we give the palm to that of the Hawke's Bay Herald, issued on the morning of Christmas Day. In a sense, we are sorry to see that our contemporary found it necessary to allude to similar human infirmities as we had occasion to do ; but in a spirit of kindliness which would be well for society if more largely practised. The Editor says:—“If a hard implacable temper be a virtue —if no mutual forbearance is to be shown—if every petty injury must be avenged —the world will become a Bedlam. Better suffer evil than inflict it, and better pardon than aggravate it, by nursing a vindictiveness which keeps the mind in perpetual unrest, and by acting on the infernal maxim, that revenge though a hundred years old has still its sucking teeth. We are none of us so faultless as to challenge eternal justice, and as not to need the mercy often denied to others. “To err is human, to forgive divine,” and Christmas will be all the merrier if men will bury the hatchet for once, and shake hands in good fellowship over the grave of their dead quarrels. Moreover, practical beneficence is still demanded in a social state from which poverty, disease, and misery are far from stamped out. Probably “theluxury of doing good ” is felt on a larger scale in this than in any previous age; but there is abundant scope yet for the service of charity. “ Kind hearts are more than coronets” —but the concentrated selfishness which neither knows nor cares about any one outside its own vestment or its own fireside, is as ignoble as it is unnatural and accursed. The man made of money, and of nothing else —of no account whatever, save his banking account —devoid of those generous sympathies which help to bridge over the perilous chasm of classes and make the whole world kin —is a pitiful creature at the best; and, however high his title, or proud his name, or boundless his wealth, will live unhonored and die unwept.”