Uncalculating Goodness

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 7, 1907

Uncalculating Goodness

WE may depend upon it that a man who wants to do something grand will never do anything good. A man who is anxious to do a resounding deed will never be a successful Christian.

Unaffected goodness is content with the wayside and the home and its opportunity among neighbors; unaffected goodness shines on children and the lowly, on nobodies, on the shameful, and on failures. Goodness does not select and calculate. I have heard a lark, singing out of heaven, rain its melody upon a field of thistles. It is always the full heart that makes goodness, and goodness is just the overflow—the overflow that drenches all that happens to be near. The care of the heart is the best way to goodness, and the proof of the heart is always in what the world calls trivialities.

I think if we were to compute the happiness of each day, we should find that the best days are made up of nothings—nothings that, after all, are everything. Small attentions, gentle courtesies, kind looks from mild, approving eyes, kind words from lips on which the law of kindness sat, a little sunshine, a kiss when you did not expect so great a treasure, the face of an old friend found along the street, or the sight of another’s joy as the cup ran over—and all the day is bright.

The happiest days are not usually the days when big things happen, but the days rich in the little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. This is a fact that those who are anxious to do good should bear much in mind. Goodness is not a monopoly of cleverness, nor the produce of massive events and vast forces, but just the play of a heart at rest, the sweet savor of a meek and quiet spirit. Ask science of the secret of the rose and its aroma. What is any fragrance but still air laden with a myriad atoms, not one of which you can discern or weigh? — Wesleyan Magazine.