Article January 24, 1914 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from W. E. Orchard

[Rev. W. E. Orchard, D.D., in The Christian Commonwealth]

Happiness is our right; happiness is the natural desire of every heart. It is the one thing which in all his strife man is seeking, even when he does not know it. Nor can he ever cease from the search, even though he never finds it, for the heart will have no rest save this. Sages may tell him that it is an ambition unworthy of man, moralists prove that the search is vain, history show that few ever found it; yet nothing will dissuade him: he is made that way, and cannot alter now.

Strange, though, that the race should be molded all down history by something that does not exist, and man all his life by something he has never seen; that we should all be haunted by a desire which we cannot define, save by negation of all that we are or know. We dream of some condition, we imagine some achievement, we labor after some ambition, believing that there for us happiness lies hid, but when we have attained we find that anticipation gave the prospect a coloring which fades as we approach: the blue is still on distant hills, the rainbow just as far away. Then is this one ideal that touches all, nature's trick to keep us moving on, a trick that still succeeds when its deception is discovered? Or is it love's game to lure us to reality? There is no other alternative, and this leads out to sunny faith and that to dark despair. Our thirst for happiness is either man's plague or God's purpose, and the mind will tell us which. It cannot be a trick of nature, for to play tricks needs a mind able to see the end from the beginning; a trick is, after all, a design, and we are borrowing the language of purpose. And life shows, too, that the quest for happiness is not a plague, for sometimes we get very near to it. It is because we know this much of it that we long for more, long for it to last forever. Indeed, it is because we know it so well by mystic knowledge that we are never content with what we are or have. Either we have fallen from it or God has sown the seed within our soil.

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