THE OLD year is drawing to a close.

We are now sufficiently detached from Christmas with its feverish mood and its outburst of feeling to enable us to look forward with leisure to the new year.

The marking of time thus exerts an undeniably wholesome influence. Always, the meeting of two years is an occasion for contemplation-reminiscent, thoughtful, eagerly anticipative. We come, as it were, to a needed pause in the precipitate rush of our journey. We take time for a brief interlude of reckoning. We stop, we look about, and attempt to locate ourselves in the eternity of time and space through which we are hurrying.

Memory comes heavily laden. The old year we are about to lose suddenly becomes near and dear to us. We reconstruct scenes, we recreate feeling, we relive passion. The hours of happiness, the delights of success, the dear inconsequential felicities come thronging in and, holding them close, we peer apprehensively into the new unknown.

But inevitably in their wake comes the vaster, sadder throng-the lost dreams and the forgotten illusions, the fierce pains and the quiet tears. And we think of the new year wishing intensely, deeply, that it will be kinder. In our heart, without our knowing, the name of a new hope has arisen

The message of a new year is always heartening. To most of us, it is one of bountiful promise and beauteous renewal. We dream, we envision glory with unreasoning enthusiasm. The spirits are high. We harken to the promise of a rich fulfillment.

To others, it is true, the new year will bear a sadder gift; happily, the human mind cannot comprehend sorrow until it is come. Even to those among us who have been severely bruised by bitterness and pain, however, the new year carries a message of healing and restoration. Time is forever a balm to the wounded and a sanctuary for the sorrowful.

It may be then that we shall have only the same great sun and the unfathomed reaches of stars above us, that we shall still look into the same unchanging rivers winding their way to the immemorial sea. It may be that the new year will bring us neither the supreme glory of great heights, nor the nameless ignominy of infinite depths. Perhaps, its gift will be only this eternal pageant of the seasons, this strange mingling of laughter and tears, this little stock of duties done and suffering borne. But even these we can look forward to with rejoicing, heeding what Oscar Wilde once so beautifully said that "he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realize something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as any one can get".