How to Make Life Pleasant.
It is a secret worth learning, to know how to be cheerful one's self, and how to make other people, and especially the home circle, happy. Some people seem to live in perpetual sunshine, and wherever they go, carry sunshine with them; others diffuse a kind of chilliness and gloom, and are always managing to say uncomfortable things. There are some persons who seem to treasure up things that are disagreeable on purpose. I can understand how a boy that had never been taught better, might carry torpedoes in his pocket, and delight to throw them down at the feet of passers-by and see them bound; but I cannot understand how an instructed and well-meaning person could do such a thing. And yet there are men that carry torpedoes all their life, and take pleasure in tossing them at people. "O," they say, "I have something now, and when I meet that man I will give it to him!" And they wait for the right company, and the right circumstances, and then they out with the most disagreeable things. And if they are remonstrated with, they say, "It is true," as if that was a justification of their conduct. If God should take all the things that are true of you, and make a scourge of them, and whip you with it, you would be the most miserable of men. But he does not use all the truth on you. And is there no law of kindness? Is there no desire to please and profit men? Have you a right to take any little story that you can pick up about a man, and use it in such a way as to injure him, or give him pain? And yet how many there are that seem to enjoy nothing so much as inflicting exquisite suffering upon a man in this way, when he cannot help himself! Well, you know just how the devil feels! Whenever he has done anything wicked, and has made somebody very unhappy, and laughs, he feels just as, for the time being, you feel, when you have done a cruel thing, and somebody is hurt, and it does you good. This bears on another point—that of saying pleasing things instead of disagreeable things. There is a person that never fails to say a pleasant thing when I meet him. If, for the sake of saying a pleasant thing he ever said an untrue thing, I should be sorry; but I trust that all of us do things in one place or another that are sufficiently praiseworthy to justify their being pleasantly spoken of; and I would rather have a person take notice of my good points than my bad, and speak of them. It makes me happier, and I feel better toward him, and toward everybody else. If a man has done anything that is creditable, is it best to praise him for that, or to find fault with him for something which he has done that is not so creditable? Is it best to encourage persons by commending them for that part of their conduct which is commendable; or to discourage them by holding up to condemnation that part of their conduct which is faulty? I know there is danger of going to extremes in this direction; and yet it is right for us to maintain a thousand courtesies that tend to give pleasure, and to avoid many rudenesses that tend to give pain. Choose things that will please men. Nutgalls are not the only things in the world. There are roses and honeysuckles. In the family, the law of pleasing ought to extend from the highest to the lowest. You are bound to please your children; and your children are bound to please each other; and you are bound to please your servants, if you expect them to please you. Some persons are pleasant in the household, and nowhere else. I have known such men. They were good fathers and kind husbands. If you had seen them in their own house, you would have thought that they were angels, almost; but if you had seen them in the street, or in the store, or anywhere else outside their house, you would have thought them almost demoniac. But the opposite is apt to be the case. When we are among our neighbors, or among strangers, we hold ourselves with self-respect, and endeavor to act with propriety; but when we get home we say to ourselves, "I have played a part long enough, and am now going to be natural." So we sit down, and are ugly, and snappish, and blunt, and disagreeable. We lay aside those thousand little courtesies that make the roughest floor smooth, that make the hardest things like velvet, and that make life pleasant. We expend all our politeness in places where it will be profitable—where it will bring silver and gold. My friends, our kindness should begin at home. It should not stay there; but there it should begin, and there it should be nourished. And nowhere else should you be so considerate of politeness as in your own house, when there is nobody there but your wife and children; for what has a man that is worth more to him than his wife and children? There are non-Christian families—families that do not profess to know the truth, or to follow Christ—that might well be models or examples to us in single things.—Ladies' Repository.