Instead of the strength of your faith being marked by the length of
your sighs, the genuineness of your religion is to be known by its
joyfulness. The same God who gives the sunlight and the smiling
fields, who makes the brooks to laugh through the meadows and the stars
to sing at night, would rather see smiles than frowns on the faces of
His children. His glory is not in gloom but in gladness. He designed
this world for happiness, and religion is but the pursuing of His plans
for the good of His children.
That which is holy must be happy. Artificial sadness is always sinful.
A church is not sacred because it looks like a sepulchre; music is not
sacred because all the spring is taken out of it. You do not keep a
day sacred to divine ends by making it dismal. It is a religious duty
resting on all to cultivate happiness, to make this world less sad.
No matter how sincere a man may be, if his sanctity results only in
sorrow to others its satisfaction to him must count for nothing. There
is a great deal of piety that needs an operation to cut the bands that
bind its heart and reduce the inflammation of its spleen. Happiness is
the very health of religion. If religion does not give right relations
to those things that determine the tone and colour of life it is a
failure.
But true happiness can never be selfish. It grows only by giving. No
one can eat a feast by himself. Happiness is not found on lonely
mounts of vision. It is a fair, refreshing stream that flows through
the dusty ways of daily life. Its waters are never so sweet and cool
to you as when you seek them for others. None ever find it who go only
with their own pitchers. The reason so many would-be saints are sad is
because they will not be other than selfish.
It is not strange that men who love this heaven-born life of ours
should turn away from the religion that represented every happy, joyous
human thing as an enormous offense against its God. Once men gathered
together every dark and depressing thought and thing and said these
constitute the divine in this world; they looked out through the smoked
glasses of sanctimony and declared that every glad, generous hearty
impulse and action must be evil because such things gave happiness.
The old boundary line between the pain that was piety and the pleasure
that spelt perdition has almost passed away. Men now know that there
is pain and loss in the way of sin, that the way of the transgressor is
hard; they learn by tasting that the fruits of righteousness are joy
and peace. The age demands what the Lord of all has ever intended,
that religion should send men on their way with the vigour of happier
hearts, with the upwelling love for men that should drive the squalor,
misery, despair, and heart-aches of sin before it.
Life has its work and it has its sorrows; but they ought both to be for
its enriching. The business of religion is to teach us that
understanding and adjustment of life which will make it a feast of fat
things, to teach us that the God of all desires the good of all. The
more true piety--the seeking for the loving will of the all wise and
loving--there is in this world the more pleasure there will be in it.
This happiness is the cure for the madness that some call pleasure.
Life is a mockery indeed to those whose only hope is for the hours of
leisure in which to drink the deadening drafts of excitement, the
lethal cup that only hides life's misery by paralyzing the faculties
against the possibilities of real pleasure. If men might only hear
again the call of Him who bade the weary and heavy laden to come; if
they might but know that His way of life can give strength, rest,
peace, joy, what an enriching life might have.
Make life happier and you will make it holier. Make it full of
pleasure--not that of a fool's paradise--but that of peace with
heaven's plans, with the joy of knowing that over all is infinite love,
the strength that comes from knowing right is invincible, the tender
and sweet joys that spring up at the touch of human love. Go your ways
to make them paths of gladness, to show love shining through sorrow, to
give love in the name of the Lord of love and yours shall be religious
service indeed.