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An essay by Henry Frederick Cope |
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The Right To Happiness |
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Title: The Right To Happiness Author: Henry Frederick Cope [More Titles by Cope] The Power of Happiness
Heaven leaves the heart when hatred enters. The man who is so wise that he never laughs is the greatest of fools. When your face spells failure it's no use talking of the glory of your faith. To set a child towards gladness is to incline him towards God. The graces do not grow in gloom. There's no argument equal to a happy smile. Stealing sorrow is as much a sin as acquiring stolen joys. Life's music is never perfect without the chord of pain. Happiness is never found by dodging my neighbour's sorrows.
THE POWER OF HAPPINESS Instead of the strength of your faith being marked by the length of your sighs, the genuineness of your religion is to be known by its joyfulness. The same God who gives the sunlight and the smiling fields, who makes the brooks to laugh through the meadows and the stars to sing at night, would rather see smiles than frowns on the faces of His children. His glory is not in gloom but in gladness. He designed this world for happiness, and religion is but the pursuing of His plans for the good of His children. That which is holy must be happy. Artificial sadness is always sinful. A church is not sacred because it looks like a sepulchre; music is not sacred because all the spring is taken out of it. You do not keep a day sacred to divine ends by making it dismal. It is a religious duty resting on all to cultivate happiness, to make this world less sad. No matter how sincere a man may be, if his sanctity results only in sorrow to others its satisfaction to him must count for nothing. There 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. Life has its work and it has its sorrows; but they ought both to be for its enriching. The business of religion is to teach us that understanding and adjustment of life which will make it a feast of fat things, to teach us that the God of all desires the good of all. The more true piety--the seeking for the loving will of the all wise and loving--there is in this world the more pleasure there will be in it. This happiness is the cure for the madness that some call pleasure. Life is a mockery indeed to those whose only hope is for the hours of leisure in which to drink the deadening drafts of excitement, the lethal cup that only hides life's misery by paralyzing the faculties against the possibilities of real pleasure. If men might only hear again the call of Him who bade the weary and heavy laden to come; if they might but know that His way of life can give strength, rest, peace, joy, what an enriching life might have. Make life happier and you will make it holier. Make it full of pleasure--not that of a fool's paradise--but that of peace with heaven's plans, with the joy of knowing that over all is infinite love, the strength that comes from knowing right is invincible, the tender and sweet joys that spring up at the touch of human love. Go your ways to make them paths of gladness, to show love shining through sorrow, to give love in the name of the Lord of love and yours shall be religious service indeed.
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS How did your Puritan forefathers dispose of the text which in their day read, "A merry heart is a continual feast." Did they explain it away by saying that the man was made anyway for fasting and not for feasting? Perhaps underneath their austere exterior they, after all, knew something of deep joys and unfailing sources of refreshing happiness. In their teaching they made the mistake of insisting that it was necessary to seem sad in order to please the Most High. We make the mistake of being sad in order to please ourselves. Their misery at least had the grace of a high motive; ours is born of a short-sighted selfishness that grasps at the shadow of a fleeting satisfaction and loses the substance of lasting joy. Happiness is the highest aim of life, higher than holiness or usefulness, because it must include both. To us it is so unfamiliar that we do not know it from frivolity; we seek the excitement of some pleasing sensation, and, rising to its stimulus, we fall afterwards into the reaction of misery. Happiness is the poise, calm, strength, and spring of the life fully in harmony with all things good and true. Nothing praises God better than a happy disposition. Many have thought to give Him glory by learned treatises on His majesty and mystery. But a little child, so happy that he only can kick and crow, praises the Almighty more effectively and even devoutly than does the theologian who only can offer his bloodless speculations. The great Father gives His children a world brimming over with joy, with laughing meadows, with smiling morns, with rippling bird song, and to man He gives faculties of immeasurable happiness. Life is learning the law of happiness and practicing its use and service. But what is the secret of happiness? How can we learn to be happy when life has so much to make us sad? The praise of happiness does not take away the fact of sorrow or solve its dark problem. There remain the million aching hearts and all the griefs of a world. True. God forbid that we should lose our sorrows; that were to make this a sad world indeed. Our cares are but part of joy's curriculum. Learning their lesson, bearing their load is essential to deep, lasting happiness. It is not the life of the butterfly experience that is firm, calm, serene in times of storm and stress. It is the life that by loads of care has been forced to strike its roots down to the rocks. There are some lives that seem to run over with a happiness that is full of refreshing to all who know them, and these have come out of great tribulation. At first the multiplication table is a burden; later, when mastered, it becomes a wonderful bearer of burdens. To wear a careworn, fretful look, to go through life shedding misery, is to confess that we have not learned our lesson, that we are dunces in life's school. The secret of happiness is in grasping the significance of living, to learn that we live for things other and higher than those mad follies and fading prizes for which men sell their bodies and souls and fret out their nerves and hearts. No man can be happy whose heart is set on the changing fashion of things or who looks for satisfaction in things. The lover is happy because he has discovered his prize and is enthralled by a pursuit that makes all other things seem mean and paltry. Men are happy in proportion as they yield themselves to the best, as they tune their hearts to strike the highest key of their lives. Paul is happier in the dungeon, where he can be true to his ideal, than Nero on the throne without one. There is feast in days of famine for those who have the inner eyes for the riches of life. You always can find in this world what your heart is looking for. But you cannot satisfy your heart on everything you may chance to find, and until the heart is satisfied and the deeper needs of the life are met there is no happiness. The search for happiness is not altogether selfish. Few things can we do that will help others more than the cultivation of serene strength and cheer in ourselves. Not the soulless, set smile, but the strength and sympathy that flow from a life fixed in confidence in eternal right and good and unfailing love.
THE FOLLY OF ANXIETY The great Teacher does not say that we are not to be thoughtful, or provident; but He insists that no event can be provided for by anxiety, by fretting over it before it comes. Half the people on our streets look as though life was a sorry business. It is hard to find a happy looking man or woman. Worry is the cause of their woebegone appearance. Worry makes the wrinkles; worry cuts the deep, down-glancing lines on the face; worry is the worst disease of our modern times. Care is contagious; it is hard work being cheerful at a funeral, and it is a good deal harder to keep the frown from your face when you are in the throng of the worry worn ones. Yet, we have no right to be dispensers of gloom; no matter how heavy our loads may seem to be we have no right to throw their burden on others nor even to cast the shadow of them on other hearts. Anxiety is instability. Fret steals away force. He who dreads to-morrow trembles to-day. Worry is weakness. The successful men may be always wide-awake, but they never worry. Fret and fear are like fine sand, thrown into life's delicate mechanism; they cause more than half the friction; they steal half the power. Cheer is strength. Nothing is so well done as that which is done heartily, and nothing is so heartily done as that which is done happily. Be happy, is an injunction not impossible of fulfillment. Pleasure may be an accident; but happiness comes in definite ways. It is the casting out of our foolish fears that we may have room for a few of our common joys. It is the telling our worries to wait until we get through appreciating our blessings. Take a deep breath, raise your chest, lift your eyes from the ground, look up and think how many things you have for which to be grateful, and you will find a smile growing where one may long have been unknown. Take the right kind of thought--for to take no thought would be sin--but take the calm, unanxious thought of your business, your duties, your difficulties, your disappointments and all the things that once have caused you fear, and you will find yourself laughing at most of them. In some you will see but friends in disguise, and in others puny foes decked out as giants. But begin to dread them, brood over them, look at them with eyes prejudiced with fear, and the least difficulties rise like mountains. In winter some people worry themselves into malaria over the mosquitoes they may meet next summer. Mistaken ideas of religion are responsible for a great many of the unnecessary wrinkles on the human face. Too many have thought it would be impossible to be happy in two worlds, and so, having elected happiness in the one which they thought would last longest, they have no choice but to be unhappy in this one. In fact, some seem to suppose that the greater their misery here the more intense will their bliss be there. If heaven is to be bought that way certainly many are paying full price for it. Burdens we all must bear; but they need not break us. Sorrows we all must share; but they need not unmake us. They will not if we have learned the Teacher's secret of living; He, the man of sorrows, was the man who could bequeath to His friends His joy. To Him life lost its anxiety, because the chief things of life were not food or raiment, or even social standing, but manhood and unselfishness to men, and the possibilities of these were as easily realized in need and adversity as in riches and prosperity. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |