It is more difficult to hold steadily a full cup than to carry an empty flagon. It is a doleful religion that uproots every flower in the garden as a noxious weed until only the naked brown earth remains to gaze upon in the blessed sunshine. It is a scurvy trick of virtue to spill the heady liquor on the ground and then with a flourish place the empty chalice an offering on the altar. Abstinence is the morality of the weak, temperance is the morality of the strong.
A deep enjoying nature is one of God's best gifts to man. The happy man is generally the best of his breed. The good are usually happy, and the happy are usually good. There are no short cuts to being happy, you must be really good to win through. If our daily occupation is congenial to our taste and disposition, our mind dwells at ease and our nature mellows in the sunshine of agreeable surroundings. Our sense of contentment radiates good humour and makes us kindly and benevolent to others. We are not chafed and fretted by duties irksome to us, because uncongenial. We are fulfilling destiny, and fulfilling it with completeness of purpose. Those around us feel the warm, penetrating sunshine of our hearts, and they grow warm under the mystic touch of the sun. It is for this reason that happiness becomes a holy quest with us, for out of it spring the virtues which robe life in beauty and gladness. One of the most precious of human faculties is the power to enjoy.
Self-denial is either a tyranny or a virtue, and should be praised with circumspection. Many feverishly religious people debase its moral currency. They hinder their own happiness and thwart the happiness of others as far as in them lies, and fancy in so doing they keep the whole ten commandments of God.
Self-denial for the sake of self-denial is a pagan rite: cold, pitiless, sterile. Renunciation and suffering prove nothing. Men have renounced and suffered for the greed of gold, for the lust of ambition, for the honour of a blood-stained idol, and lost moral stamina in so doing. The experience of ages brands deep the flaming truth upon us that sacrifice must be valued according to the object for which the sacrifice is made. Sacrifice for its own sake weaves no crown of glory for the martyr's brow. It is a form of amiable suicide. If you starve yourself for the sake of showing mastery over self, what thank have ye? The heathen do even the same--and do it better. It is an act of self-torture, and ministers to your pride of purpose. But to give up a meal when hungry that one you love may have it puts a better complexion on the deed. To bear pain for the grim joy of bearing it brings no reward. Do not even the Stoics the same? But to bear pain rather than surrender truth or to cover a suffering friend is a loving and heroic act, meriting a V.C. when spiritual honours are distributed.
The old painters pictured in glowing witchery of colour the ordeal by suffering as the master-key that opened the gates of paradise to macerated mortals. The old writers drove home the same insidious error with all the pious fervour of their fluent pen, and thus men became fascinated with the doctrine of self-immolation as the highest good. In mediæval times the via dolorosa was the well-trodden public way travelled by sainted pilgrims seeking a better country.
Meritorious misery won through, for it was aureoled with the Church's benediction and rendered attractive by her promise of eternal rewards. Surely this daily human life of ours was not ordained to be a pageant of austerity reaching from the cradle to the grave. The Creator, having given this beautiful world as a temporary home for His children to dwell in, expects agreeable people to occupy its furnished splendours for a space of three score years and ten, more or less. If not, then the Creator's gift is wasted bounty flung to dull and unappreciative mortals.
Brighter and healthier views of life emerge out of the crude misconceptions which enveloped the past in religious gloom, although there yet remain amongst us people who revel in the luxury of self-denial as in a feast of fat things, while the genial side of their nature remains dormant, starved, stunted. I have seen such-like in the flesh, spoken with them and touched their cold hands. They are unattractive people to know, and not companionable to travel with. They are faultless, methodical, patient, but they have no endearing friendships, no entwining intimacies by which you can fasten on them and love them. They are isolated and self-contained, lacking the charm of some little human weakness which makes us all akin. They may have a warm heart, but chilled blood circulates round it. Their eyes glitter like glaciers at the call of duty. They hurry from committee meeting to committee meeting, and forget to lunch between engagements. They shine in the performance of self-imposed errands of mercy, and live by rule relentlessly at any cost to pocket, health, or reputation. They minister to the sick and poor assiduously, and mother a class of poor factory girls in the evening, but their home is shivery to enter as a cold storage. A cold storage is a curious place to visit, but an impossible place to dwell in, except for frozen goods.
It is possible to make the best of both worlds without an uncomfortable sense of sin nagging you like toothache; it is possible to work for others and yet tend your own vineyard with whole-hearted joy garnered from the wonder and beauty and sunshine of this our earthly home. The man is not a miscreant who laughs heartily and often: the person is not a saint who starves his body to save his soul.
The harassing question is, How can we make the best of life as it comes to us a day at a time, and yet sail on an even keel? It is the problem that prophets, savants, and theologians have hammered at through the ages, but have not yet forged in fine gold the key that unlocks the mystery; thus there is an opening for us to cut in before the final word is uttered and the discussion battens down under a unanimous show of hands, which crowning mercy will be the last far-off result of time. The question agitating the moment is, What shall we do with the fair flower of our earthly life? Shall we enjoy it as we would the beauty and fragrance of a rose, thanking the good God for a gift so sweet and precious, or shall we with peevish fingers pick the rose to pieces petal by petal and crush it under foot, fearing its beauty may seduce our virtue and its perfume poison our soul?
Let us preserve the rose inviolate. Its role is to be joy-giver on the earth. I would sooner sit with Jesus Christ at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee and drink with Him wine of the best vintage that ever flowed on festive board than sup with John Baptist in the wilderness on his menu of locusts and wild honey. The exquisite scene my imagination quaintly pictures is Jesus Christ and John the Baptist sitting together at the banquet, and each enjoying the meal with equal zest.