Article March 18, 1911 Issue

TRUE HAPPINESS

EVELYN CAMPBELL.

Some time ago I heard a little story which helped me very much. A friend of mine was walking on a golf course, and passed a man who was intently hunting through a clump of furze bushes. She had gone on for some ways when she noticed a golf ball lying on the turf, and going back told the man, who was still beating vigorously through the furze bushes. Yes, he had lost his ball, he said; but he would hardly go with her and look, as he felt certain it had fallen among the furze bushes and that he should find it there sooner or later. He went with her, however, and was very much surprised when he found that he had been mistaken, as the ball lying on the turf proved to be his. The man knew he had sent his ball somewhere, but he made the mistake of looking for it in the wrong place.

The little story helped me, because I was just then feeling very much discouraged, and it struck me that I was rather like that man. I was looking for happiness, but search as I might I never seemed quite able to reach it. Yet true happiness lay waiting for me all the time; I had only to stop looking for it in the tangle of material things—I had to raise my eyes above them; I had to be willing to hear, and I had also to give up my own sense of where true happiness lay. Mrs. Eddy says (Science and Health, p. 57), "Happiness is spiritual," and in those three words she goes to the root of the matter. These words of the psalmist often help me: "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage." It is worth noting that the verse is not written in the future but in the present tense, and we should be ready to accept that goodly heritage which is waiting here and now for each one of God's children.

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