The substance of happiness

Contents

I Happiness — The Quest and the

Tangles 3

II Happiness — Revelation and the

II (b) REVELATION AND THE LOWER SELF

" There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he delight his senses in his labor. This also I saw that it was from the hand of God." — Ecclesiastes 2: 24 (Marginal Reading).

II

IN the last sermon, discussing the question of happiness as a legitimate aim of life, we noted a dualism in character — a lower self of self-interest and of physical law, and a higher self of self-sacrifice and spiritual law. We reached the opinion that the quest for happiness of the lower self was a worthy one up to the point where it interfered with the happiness of the higher self. Our question now is, what has the Bible revealed for the enhancement of the happiness of the lower self.

First, it has told of those things in character and conduct which preclude the possibility of happiness. It has written the basal laws of morality and warned us against their infraction, making it clear to us, that as violation of the laws of water, air and fire bring disaster, so violation of moral law has its certain penalty of misery. Observance of the mere negatives of the Decalogue would increase human happiness immeasurably, but when we find their content spiritualized and made positive in the teaching of Jesus, we see how faithful obedience to it would not only banish sorrow but would fill the earth with gladness. [19]

Envy, " withering at another's joy" and " hating that excellence it cannot reach," that mark of inferiority for which the great soul has neither time nor room, and which is quite incompatible with happiness, is ranked with murder, drunkenness and every evil work, and unsparingly condemned. Thrift is commended and the wastrel banned. We are warned that neither power, nor fame, nor even freedom from life's cares can bring real joy. Indeed, the teaching and example of Jesus, touching the bearing of the daily burden indicates that without it the heart must go unsatisfied.

"If all the world were sunshine, Our faces would be fain To feel once more upon them The cooling plash of rain.

"If all the world were music, Our hearts would often long For one sweet strain of silence, To break the endless song.

"If life were always merry, Our souls would seek relief, And rest from weary laughter In the quiet arms of grief."

We are reminded that the meek inherit the earth, the poor in spirit the Kingdom of heaven, and that it is the pure in heart who joy in the vision of God.

Moreover, the whole trend of the Book with its steady refusal to overemphasize the material, makes for that simplicity which is so large a factor in happiness. Even the pessimist Schopenhauer has noted that the Idyll, the only form of poetry which is used exclusively to portray felicity, reveals life always in its simplest form. In Lewis Carroll's " Through a Looking Glass/ ' we catch the reflection of the White Knight. His accoutrements are fearful and wonderful. His horse carries a bee hive, in the event of meeting homeless bees; a mouse- trap in the event of meeting predacious mice; while the steed's ankles are panoplied in case sharks should attack in force. But in spite of his equipment, or because of it, the Knight fai s of success. " Whenever the horse stopped he fell off in front, and when he went on again he fell off behind," not to mention a habit he had of falling sideways. It is a parable of life. We burden ourselves with the things which are supposed to bring happiness, only to find, whether or not we admit it, that happiness is precluded by them. I shall never forget a man who was my host on the wild plains of Saskatchewan, before the tide of immigration had set in from the States. He had once been prosperous, but was now reduced to the bare necessities of life, though rich still in health and peace and the deeper joys of living. We had watched a sunset of incredible splendor, and as the after-glow faded from lilac into lavender we turned to enter the house. He paused a moment on the threshold, then turned and said impressively " Blessed be nothing." We had little speech after that. There was nothing to say. For had he not revealed to me the deep secret of his life? " You ask for happiness " says Car-

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lyle," 'Oh give me happiness ' and they hand you ever new varieties of covering for the skin, ever new kinds of supply for the digestive apparatus.

Well, rejoice in your upholsteries and cookeries if so be they will make you ' happy.' Let the varieties of them be continual and innumerable. In all things let perpetual change, if that is a perpetual blessing for you, be your portion instead of mine. Incur the prophetic curse and in all things in this sublunary world ' make yourselves like unto a wheel. ' Mount into your railways; whirl from place to place at the rate of fifty or if you like five hundred miles an hour; you cannot escape from the inexorable, all-encircling ocean-moan of ennui. No; if you could mount to the stars and do yacht-voyages under the belts of Jupiter, or stalk deer on the ring of Saturn it would still be-girdle you. You cannot escape from it; you can but change your place in it without solacement except one moment's. That prophetic Sermon from the Deeps will continue with you until you wisely interpret it and do it, or else till the Crack of Doom swallows it and you."

Again, the Bible reveals the basis of physical health. . " A sound mind in a sound body," says John Locke, "is a short but full description of a happy state in this world." Dr. Johnson contended that illness makes a man a scoundrel. Sidney Smith speaks of a man whom most of us have known who " has not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed." Without doubt, good health is, for the majority of men the most important element in happiness. And the question which agitates us is seldom, though it should be often, how can we retain health, but always how can we regain it when once it is lost? With the allopathist and the homeopathist we are all familiar. Comes now the bibliopathist asserting full ability in the premises. Eddyism, new thought, mental science, the Immanuel movement, presenting as they do such widely differing ideas that they should not be mentioned together thus without far more apology and explanation than we have space for, still agree in this: That a resident physician abides in every human body; that if he be free to act his ministrations are more important than those of any other physician; and that his freedom to act depends upon whether or not the whole life of the organism is in harmony with the life of God. It is precisely this life of harmony with God which Revelation inculcates and makes possible, as does no other book. We have come to see that that bodily health is conditioned, to the highest degree, upon our states of mind. Our thoughts must be benevolent. " Had I my life to live over,' 7 says one, " I would praise more and blame less." " If we regard ourselves as free agents," says Mr. Arnold Bennett, " and the personalities surrounding us as the puppets of determinism, we shall have arrived at the working compromise from which the finest results of living can be obtained." Mr. Bennett confides to us that much of his wisdom in these matters is drawn from the Stoics (with some reference to Mrs. Annie Besant), but probably there is no more perfect admonition on the point than the words of Jesus, " Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what measure ye meet, it shall be measured to you again."

We have learned that we must think on our points of strength rather than our points of weakness. If our lungs are impaired we must fix attention upon some more normal organ, as the heart. If hearing is dulled, we may perhaps rejoice in good eyesight. If disordered nerves make life a burden, we must comfort ourselves with the strong probability that our more vital parts are in excellent working order. In short we must make practical application of Paul's principle, " Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good," to the problem of bodily health. We have learned that our thoughts must be calm, without worry and without fear. Incomparably greater than any other force of all time in the destruction of fear is Jesus' teaching of forgiveness, and of immortality. And when he said " Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on . . . Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly father feedeth them. . . . Consider the lilies, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these, Wherefore if God so clothe the grass of the field which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you? . . . for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things," — when He spoke thus He used words which, in their power to deliver from the thraldom of care, are potent beyond any which have fallen on the weary ears of men. Of more value than all drugs in all the drugshops of the world are faith and hope and love. Of more value than all the teaching of all the medical schools under heaven are these seven words: Be good, and you shall be well.

Again, the Bible reveals the principles on which a social structure consistent with happiness may be builded.

There are certain common, elemental needs on which the bulk of human happiness depends. If these needs are met, we shall be reasonably happy; if they are unmet, happiness, while not impossible, is difficult. There is the need of food. The clergyman who asked his aged parishoner as she lay upon her deathbed, what in the long life now closing she was most thankful for, was a bit surprised when she answered, brightening, " My victuals, sir." The eye needs something good to look at; the ear needs something good to hear; the mind needs something with which it may worthily occupy itself; and the heart needs the unspeakable blessing of family life and love.

There is need also for the great happiness of work, and with this thought we can afford to linger because work is in itself a thing of joy. It is a keen, rare joy, so long as it consists in the exercise of surplus energy. When we go beyond [25]

the exercise of surplus energy, squandering principle instead of wisely spending interest, it becomes a drudgery and a curse. And we can afford to linger here, not only because, rightly ordered, work is itself a delight, — that which is irksome in youth becoming often the sole satisfaction of manhood — but because the whole subject of work is bound up so closely with the question of decent satisfaction of eye and ear and mind and affection. How shall we scheme life so that all shall have the joy of working enough, and none the misery of overwork; so that all shall not only create, but receive through their labor, such reward as makes possible the eye's desire for some at least of the beauties of nature and of art; of the ear's desire for the harmonies of music; of the mind's desire for lofty speech and noble books; of the heart's desire for family life from which love does not fly through the window as poverty stalks in at the doors? So far, society has no reason to be proud of its answer to the question. Recent figures indicate that there are some two and a half million children engaged in industry in the United States. Twenty-five dusky regiments, each a thousand strong could be mustered from the coal-mines and breakers. Eighty thousand are in the textile mills, and twenty thousand of these are under twelve years of age. Seven thousand, five hundred, are in the glass factories. Twelve thousand are in tobacco factories. Ten thousand are in the saw-mills. Forty-two thousand are in the messenger service, their work in many instances requiring them to enter frequently saloons and houses of ill-fame; while every summer Sabbath morning when church-bells ring for Sunday-school, it is estimated that there are two hundred and fifty thousand caddies on the links. There are three hundred twenty five thousand unemployed men in Greater New York. In the under-world of London fifty thousand women toil for three cents an hour in hovels unfit for cattle, slaving at their work — and starving when there is none. " Who is responsible," says Mr. Lloyd-George passionately, in supporting his plan for old-age pensions, " for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labor to win a bare and precarious subsistence for himself, and when, at the end of his days, he claims at the hands of the country he served, a poor pension of eight pence a day, he can only get it through a revolution, and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night, whilst he slumbers, more than his poor neighbor receives in a whole year of toil? Where did the table of that law come from? Whose fingers inscribed it?"

Professor Irving Fisher of Yale calculates that the annual child crop of the United States is worth seven billion dollars, and that forty-seven per cent of all who die under five years of age could be saved by an expenditure of twenty dollars for each. He further says that through unnecessary industrial accidents, sickness due to overwork, and early old age due to over-strain, our army of toilers waste one million, three hundred thousand years of time annually. China seems continually emerging from famine, with hundreds dead. Millions in Russia live with so narrow a margin of sustenance that the failure of one crop brings them to starvation, and crop failures are of common occurrence, though the Government strives, and sometimes successfully, to conceal the facts. It has been estimated recently after an exhaustive social survey in one of our great industrial centers, that only two per cent of the workers there have any margin between themselves and want. Seeking the supreme tragedy of the ages, we shall not find it in the works of Sophocles of Shakespeare or Ibsen, but in great manufacturing centers where men by thousands go each day to work haunted by the knowledge that if tomorrow health should fail or work be slack, they, and their wives and little ones must stand between the twin evils of hunger on the one hand, and charity on the other. Theirs it is, through all the years of life " to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be weary, heart- worn."

If we ask what is to be done about it, there are three answers. The first is the answer of the comfortable — "do nothing," and they reiterate it until the more far-seeing among them discern a danger of losing their comforts, whereupon we hear the answer of the present day liberal-radicals in England, and of our own progressives. Industry must be purified and made more just to labor and capital alike, through a system of Governmental supervision. All economic effort is to become the business of the nation. Even Mr. Taft holds that unless "big business " can be made to behave, it must pass under Governmental control. Mr. Roosevelt would have a Governmental commission to undertake the supervision, regulation and control of great corporations, even to the control of "monopoly prices, ,, and " this control should indirectly or directly extend to dealing with all questions connected with their treatment of their employes, including the wages, hours of labor and the like;" while Mr. Wilson says, " Business is no longer in any proper sense a private matter. Our program, from which we cannot be turned aside is, that we are going to take control of our own economic life." All in all it would seem that a partnership between Government and capital, instead of a warfare, is at hand, in which capital is to be shorn of its perverseness, and the bright millennial goal of the Progressives attained.

The third answer is the answer of the socialist, with whom, it is very evident, we must reckon more and more. He is impatient with the progressive, declaring his scheme a mere palliative, a reform of capital for capital's sake; a mere scraping of the barnacles from the hull of the warship, an unlimbering of its batteries for the more effective bombardment of socialism itself. He says that undoubtedly these reforms will be finally accomplished for purely selfish reasons, without materially changing conditions; that in his program these things are merely secondary, the real aim being to strike at the root of the evil [29]

by complete emancipation of the producer, and entire abolition of the capitalistic system. " The legal constitution of every period/' says Rosa Luxemburg, " is solely a product of revolution. While revolution is the political act of creation, of class history, legislation is the continued political growth of society. The work of reform has in itself no driving force outside of the revolution.

. . . Therefore the person who speaks for the method of legal reform instead of the conquest of political power and the overthrow of society, is not as a matter of fact, in a quieter, safer and slower way, moving toward the same goal, but a different goal altogether; namely, instead of bringing about a new social order, merely the accomplishment of unessential changes in the old one."

The socialist believes that the worker produces a value equal to his daily wage in a very few hours ; that if he owned and controlled the means of production, land, machinery, tools, — he would need to work only so many hours as the production of the necessities of life for himself and family required. If in five hours, the worker produces value equal to his wages, it is evident that the value produced in each succeeding hour of the daily toil is a gift to his employer. If he works for ten hours, he has produced twice as much as he receives and the five hours " surplus value " is filched from him by " capital." Karl Marx does not hesitate to say that rent, interest and profits are unearned, and one of his modern disciples says: " It remains the one central fact of Capitalism, however, that a surplus value is created by the working class and taken by the exploiting class, from which develops the class struggle of our time." Moreover, the socialist has developed much keenness in answering the time-honored questions with which he is assailed. If asked concerning his relation to the church he says he, and not the average church member is the true follower of Christ.

"Take then your paltry Christ, Your gentleman God.

We want the carpenter's son, With his saw and hod."

Asked concerning free-love he replies that ninetyfive per cent of modern socialists condemn it. If we ask how the capitalistic system is to be abolished he says it is to be without violence, probably a confiscation by taxation. If we venture to remind him that even so it is unjust, he denies it and expresses the hope that the thing may be brought about by the voluntary surrender of capital. " As for taking such property from the owners," says Mr. H G. Wells, " why shouldn't we? The world has not only in the past taken slaves from their owners, with no compensation, or with meager compensation; but in the history of mankind, dark as it is, there are innumerable cases of slave-holders resigning their inhuman rights." Asked whether profits may not be the " wages of risk," the due return for the adventure of capital, he replies that unless society gave the capitalist a good chance he would not take it; that the laborer's risk is also great; and that the [31]

" wages of risk " for both are derived from labor. Asked if profit is not just reward for the capitalist's frugality in saving up his capital, he points out that the capitalist of the present day is not conspicuous for frugality, and that, strive as he will, he is often unable to spend his income. Asked if profits may not be the " wages of superintendence/ ' the " rent of ability," he answers that for the most part, the management of modern industry is in the hands of salaried employes; while the profits, for the most part go to shareholders who have contributed no service to the industry. We are also assured (though the explanations here are extremely difficult to reconcile with the main contention) that socialism does not contemplate the abolition of private property, nor the mechanical equality of men, nor the communistic levelling of incomes. Whatever the defects of the system may be, it is surely not all devoid of reason, and most emphatically is not the thing of torch and pillage, dynamite and blood, which some have believed it to be.

Listening to these various answers we feel that each of them is inadequate. Desperate cases require desperate remedies, while these proposals of a shallow externalism, radical as some of them are, seem to suggest lozenges for lock-jaw, or peppermint essence for broken legs. What answer hath the Son of Man made? Capitalism claims His support because He has said " Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away, even that which he hath."

Socialism claims His support because once he told the story of a man who, hiring laborers for his vineyard, gave the same wage to each, regardless of the number of hours each had worked. But the fact that these two passages are flatly contradictory if we regard them as deliverances upon an economic question leads us to conclude immediately that Jesus spoke in neither instance of industrial, but purely of spiritual concerns. For these passages are not contradictory in the spiritual sphere, but equally true. To him that hath the things of God, are given the things of God, while from him that hath them not, they are taken away; and the parable of the laborers in the vineyard reminds us that in the world of the spirit, it is not service, but motive, that is reckoned to us, — not what we do, but what we will to do. " 'Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do," says Browning's David and his Abt Vogler declares:

" There shall never be one lost good, . . . All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; Not its semblance but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard : Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by."

To Jesus, the mere form of society, whether individualist or collectivist, capitalistic or socialistic, was a matter of indifference, but its spirit was a matter of infinite concern. He would not be a judge or divider over men in questions relating to property, but He burned to impart those principles without which no social question can be rightly settled, and with which every social question can be rightly settled, — " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self." " Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." And because it hath pleased God to " gather in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth" we move toward a golden age of brotherhood and peace. Whether it shall be an age in which the present system is perfected until socialism is unnecessary, or whether even now there forms in the womb of the present a future for the socialist's radiant dream, who shall presume to say? But whether the present system shall persist, or be superseded by another, the only hope for the success of either lies in the transmutation of Christ's teaching into character.

" If you and I and all men else Were filled of God with loving sacrifice, Then joyousness and peace would fill the world As oceans fill their all-enclosing shores, Or as the sun, unclouded, fills the skies with light."

Lastly, the Bible gives us a firm assurance of the moral order of the universe. The world we know obeys neither the Decalogue, nor the Sermon on the Mount; nor is there immediate prospect of its doing so. It has not conquered disease of the body through health of the soul. Every day a thousand fall at our side, and ten thousand at our right hand, among them our best-beloved. The teaching of Jesus has not yet produced the ideal commonwealth, and the tarrying is long. How shall we withstand those floods of grief which soon or late assail us all, sweeping happiness away, wrecking to pitiable driftwood our puny theories of it? When we ask whether light will ever follow the darkness, and peace come out of pain; or whether life is only a wild welter beneath the dumb and heartless stars, what answer comes? This: God made all, rules all, works through all, to purposes of perfect love.

Robert Louis Stevenson tells of a ship stormcaught off a rocky coast, and driven inland until death for all seems imminent. The passengers huddle in fear below until one finds courage for the perilous climb to the pilot-house, where he sees the steersman lashed to the wheel. Becoming aware of the frightened passenger, the steersman turns to him and smiles, while he steadily swings the ship toward the safety of the deeper seas. And the passenger goes below to tell his comrades " All's well. I have seen the pilot's face, and he smiled!" To believe that One is at the helm, and that He smiles, is to possess the largest single factor in the happiness of both the lower and the higher life. It thrusts all the evil, all the wrong, all the sorrow of the universe back into its fitting place as something foreign, not omnipotent, and finally to be destroyed. It makes joy gigantic, and sadness small. It enables the statesman to rise above the red triumph of anarchy in the hour when national foundations seem shaken and to declare " God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives." It enables men and women to face, unmoved and strong of heart, their unknown destinies, saying :

" I go to prove my soul!

I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first, I ask not. . . .

In some time, his good time I shall arrive:

He guides me and the bird. In his good time."

It enables a thousand thousand fathers and a thousand thousand mothers who stumble tearblinded to the silent city to lay their loved ones down in slumber till the resurrection morning, to turn and gaze in each other's streaming eyes, and still through quivering lips to say " It is all for the best — someway." All hope for the world's happiness lies in this Book, and nowhere else. Let us love it, learn it, live it, spread it, until the day break, and the shadows flee away !

Ill

(c) REVELATION AND THE HIGHER SELF

' "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." — John 14: 27.

Ill

IN the first sermon of this series we raised the question whether or not the quest of happiness was a legitimate one. In answering it we pointed out that with each of us there is a lower self, a self of self-interest, conditioned by physical law; and a higher self, unselfish, spiritual, and transcending physical law. Our question now is: What has the Bible revealed for the enhancement of the happiness of the highest self.

First, revelation assumes that happiness is attainable. Upon the plains of Shinar, Job wins through unspeakable pain and disaster to the plains of peace. Paul and Silas in that inner dungeon among the sewer pipes of Philippi, their backs raw from scourging, and their feet thrust into the cruel stocks, shake the midnight with their hymns of praise. It has not been otherwise with the saints of a later day. Though John Bunyan has been denied an appeal, and has been delivered again to his jailer, his spirit scorns confinement. It transforms his cell into a palace beautiful. His warden is now an Apollyon, and now a Greatheart. The hills about are the Delectable Mountains. The stream yonder is the river of the water of life, and the town, small, yet large enough to mirror all the joys and sorrows and passions and renunciations of the world, is the town of Vanity Fair. George Matheson felt the sun failing before his university course was completed, and a little later even the stars failed in his ray less night of blindness. Yet you cannot read his singing prose or his exulting poetry without being made aware that his life was filled with joy. His preaching was an out-pouring of the soul like the lark's overflowing music as it mounts into the blue, and when he laid down his work he said: " My life has been an obstructed life, a circumscribed life, but a life of boundless sanguineness, a life of quenchless hopefulness, a life which, even at the time of abandoned work said not " Good-night " but " Good-morning." Following the gleam of God's revealed will, even though it be " through peril, toil and pain," myriads have found peace. The quest for the happiness of the higher self is not, therefore, a hopeless one. Each of us may hope to reach the goal.