How did your Puritan forefathers dispose of the text which in their day
read, "A merry heart is a continual feast." Did they explain it away
by saying that the man was made anyway for fasting and not for
feasting? Perhaps underneath their austere exterior they, after all,
knew something of deep joys and unfailing sources of refreshing
happiness.
In their teaching they made the mistake of insisting that it was
necessary to seem sad in order to please the Most High. We make the
mistake of being sad in order to please ourselves. Their misery at
least had the grace of a high motive; ours is born of a short-sighted
selfishness that grasps at the shadow of a fleeting satisfaction and
loses the substance of lasting joy.
Happiness is the highest aim of life, higher than holiness or
usefulness, because it must include both. To us it is so unfamiliar
that we do not know it from frivolity; we seek the excitement of some
pleasing sensation, and, rising to its stimulus, we fall afterwards
into the reaction of misery. Happiness is the poise, calm, strength,
and spring of the life fully in harmony with all things good and true.
Nothing praises God better than a happy disposition. Many have thought
to give Him glory by learned treatises on His majesty and mystery. But
a little child, so happy that he only can kick and crow, praises the
Almighty more effectively and even devoutly than does the theologian
who only can offer his bloodless speculations.
The great Father gives His children a world brimming over with joy,
with laughing meadows, with smiling morns, with rippling bird song, and
to man He gives faculties of immeasurable happiness. Life is learning
the law of happiness and practicing its use and service.
But what is the secret of happiness? How can we learn to be happy when
life has so much to make us sad? The praise of happiness does not take
away the fact of sorrow or solve its dark problem. There remain the
million aching hearts and all the griefs of a world. True. God forbid
that we should lose our sorrows; that were to make this a sad world
indeed. Our cares are but part of joy's curriculum. Learning their
lesson, bearing their load is essential to deep, lasting happiness.
It is not the life of the butterfly experience that is firm, calm,
serene in times of storm and stress. It is the life that by loads of
care has been forced to strike its roots down to the rocks. There are
some lives that seem to run over with a happiness that is full of
refreshing to all who know them, and these have come out of great
tribulation.
At first the multiplication table is a burden; later, when mastered, it
becomes a wonderful bearer of burdens. To wear a careworn, fretful
look, to go through life shedding misery, is to confess that we have
not learned our lesson, that we are dunces in life's school.
The secret of happiness is in grasping the significance of living, to
learn that we live for things other and higher than those mad follies
and fading prizes for which men sell their bodies and souls and fret
out their nerves and hearts. No man can be happy whose heart is set on
the changing fashion of things or who looks for satisfaction in things.
The lover is happy because he has discovered his prize and is
enthralled by a pursuit that makes all other things seem mean and
paltry. Men are happy in proportion as they yield themselves to the
best, as they tune their hearts to strike the highest key of their
lives. Paul is happier in the dungeon, where he can be true to his
ideal, than Nero on the throne without one.
There is feast in days of famine for those who have the inner eyes for
the riches of life. You always can find in this world what your heart
is looking for. But you cannot satisfy your heart on everything you
may chance to find, and until the heart is satisfied and the deeper
needs of the life are met there is no happiness.
The search for happiness is not altogether selfish. Few things can we
do that will help others more than the cultivation of serene strength
and cheer in ourselves. Not the soulless, set smile, but the strength
and sympathy that flow from a life fixed in confidence in eternal right
and good and unfailing love.