movement toward perfection must take a conscious form. This conscious
form is happiness,--the satisfaction of the vital impulse,--the rhythm
of the inward life,--the melody of a heart that has found its keynote.
To say that all men long for this is simply to confess that all men are
human, and that their thoughts and feelings are an essential part of
their life. Virtue means a completed manhood. The joyful welfare of the
soul belongs to the fulness of that ideal. Holiness is wholeness. In
striving to realize the true aim of our being, we find the wish for
happiness implanted in the very heart of our effort.

Now what does Christ say in regard to this natural human wish? Does He
say that it is an illusion? Does He condemn and deny it? Would He have
accepted Goethe's definition: "religion is renunciation"?

Surely such a notion is far from the spirit of Jesus. There is nothing
of the hardness of Stoicism, the coldness of Buddhism, in Christ's
gospel. It is humane, sympathetic, consoling. Unrest and weariness, the
fever of passion and the chill of despair, soul-solitude and
heart-trouble, are the very things that He comes to cure. He begins His
great discourse with a series of beatitudes. "Blessed" is the word.
"Happy" is the meaning. Nine times He rings the changes on that word,
like a silver bell sounding from His fair temple on the mountain-side,
calling all who long for happiness to come to Him and find rest for
their souls.

Christ never asks us to give up merely for the sake of giving up, but
always in order to win something better. He comes not to destroy, but to
fulfil,--to fill full,--to replenish life with true, inward, lasting
riches. His gospel is a message of satisfaction, of attainment, of
felicity. Its voice is not a sigh, but a song. Its final word is a