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.