THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING " You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself flow eth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars ; and 'perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heir as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world" Thomas Traherne. J s . '3 1 I ■ tea &'S Copyright, 1908, By Luthek H. Cary © ©' CONTENTS © Life's an Akt PAGE Life's a Game 12 Life's a Jest 19 Life's a Fairy-Tale 28 © © THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING LIFE'S AN ART ®, ( NE of the most extraordinary things in the world is that two and two do not always make four. An ordinary-looking man sits down at a canvas and makes two strokes here and two there with his brush, and the result is not four strokes. It is a field, with the sun setting on the horizon, and one soli- tary tree standing up gaunt and grim against the sky. Or it may be a ship sailing on a broad sea in the sunlight, or a human face looking round at you with a curious, haunt- ing look about it that remains in your mem- ory for days. But whatever it is, the result of these two strokes and two strokes is not merely four strokes ; it is the spirit of even- ing or sea-sunshine or mocking laughter. The result is not four strokes ; it is a new world. So it is with music, where two notes and two notes are mingled together by the musi- cian, and the result is not four notes, but a great Amen, or a star in the evening sky, or an angel chorus. Now that is what all art is in the world : it is the taking of two common, ordinary things here and two common, ordinary [7] © ® ® ® ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING things there and the making of them into a wonderful and beautiful new world. The great parable of true art is the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, where five common loaves and two fishes became, in the hands of the Master, an abundant feast for a great multitude. All true art is, then, the gathering together of the every-day sounds of the world from anvil and street and workshop, and the blending of these very sounds into Handel's "Messiah," or the gathering together of the every-day ex- periences from the hearts of common men and women into a Twenty-third Psalm or a beautiful hymn or poem. Art is the gath- ering together of the common things and the making of them into something beauti- ful. A boy and a girl shouting and laughing on the seashore in their play, a lad singing to himself as he rows his boat out in the waters, ships passing, and the old feeling of sadness and loss in the heart of some one who looks upon this happy scene, why, these are all common things which have come into our experience scores of times ! But Tennyson takes them, and listen to the result : "O well for the fisherman's boy, That he shouts with his sister at play ! O well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay ! «< And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!" [8] THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING Why has God not made us all artists? How glorious it would be to be able to write such a poem, or to compose a piece of music in which thousands would find con- solation and peace ! Oh, why are we all such ordinary people without the power of artistic creation ! Let us console ourselves with the thought of the unsatisfactoriness of all art. The artist is always aiming at something which he cannot attain. Only second-class arv can be called perfect. All true art is a noble failure. For the true artist is aiming at something far above his capacity to express. What is that at which all true artists are aiming ? It is life, it is reality. The painter tries to catch the magic of the lights and shadows and passing graces of the human face he paints, but he never wholly succeeds in overtaking the reality. The writer tries to express the feelings of Romeo and Juliet in moonlight on the balcony, but what writer ever was able to express the thou- sandth part of the real rapture of such true love? All great art is an imperfect, halt- ing attempt to catch up upon life. For life is the greatest art of all, and the master- artist is the man who is living the beautiful life. We cannot all of us excel in the minor arts. But whether we like it or no, we all are artists in the art of arts and are producing either ugly or beautiful lives out of the materials at our command. Here we all are, then, sitting at our [J 1 sepa- ® ® THE KEEN JOT OF LIVING ©// rate benches, trying to produce out of the materials before us a work of art, a beau- tiful life. What are the materials which have been given you? Imperfect health, faulty edu- cation, a most uninspiring home, with such unsympathetic parents or sisters and brothers, very limited means, and a natu- rally lazy temperament ? I see you looking over at my bench and thinking that if you only had my material it would be easy for you to produce a beautiful life. Stop, you are wrong; the task is equally hard for every one of us in this great art studio, whether you think it or not. Your materials are pretty poor, — I grant it, — nearly as bad as my own. But, my dear sir or madam, that is to spur you to artistic achievement. None of the materials of true art are beauti- ful to start with, otherwise there would be no credit in the artist's producing the grand result. Let your artist's pride awaken and make of these humdrum, unromantic life- materials of yours a Messiah, a Sistine Madonna, a Twenty-third Psalm. There is no pleasure in the world like that of the artist who out of unpromising materials has produced a beautiful result. I saw to-day that glow of honest, happy joy on the face of a little fellow who ran out of a house I was passing. With a tiny stub of a pencil he had produced a picture of a ship on the back of an old advertise- ment. "Oh, Miss Thomas," he was say- ing as I passed, holding it up to her, 'do [ 10 ] THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING you think this is any good ? I did it with these," and the tiny bit of pencil and old advertisement sheet were in his hand. So we shall all stand before our Father, showing our poor materials, our poor result, the lives we have struggled over so much, and looking up into his face with shame at the failure and yet with a certain happy pride in the consciousness of struggle and achievement — "Do you think it is any good?" Yet it must always be with deep shame, for we remember One, the Master-Artist in the art of living. His life-materials were poor enough — humble birth, meager edu- cation, narrow means, spiteful enemies, cowardly friends, disappointed hopes, short life, violent and shameful death. Yet out of these materials what a life he produced ! Can we complain ? Let us rouse ourselves to artistic creation that the beauty of the Lord our God may be upon us and that all our lives may have a far-off likeness to the life of One, the Master-Craftsman in the making of true and noble lives. LIFE'S A GAME W HY is it, mamma," said a boy as he came in from a missionary meeting, "that good people are so uninteresting?" The mother was a wise woman and did not preach a sermon just then upon the de- pravity of the youthful heart which makes all good things uninteresting to boys, but, with that fairness which some parents con- sider so unsafe but which commands the confidence of sons, she answered, "Well, my dear, I think if good people are unin- teresting it is because they have not got enough religion." "Not got enough reli- gion!" answered her son; "why, this man was full of religion, but he was as uninteresting as he could be." The mother recognized clearly enough the causes which might have made this speaker uninteresting to her boy, but she felt there was justice enough in his implied charge that all good people were uninteresting to make it worth her while to answer him upon his own ground. As a reward she had this opportunity of telling him at his own request what real religion was. And this is a boy's memory of what she said, in- terpreted perhaps by the experiences of the intervening years ; I pass it on to you now in mv own words. -C-) rr \ y/1 rr$\ my [ 12 ] t ^„ ® ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING Are you enjoying life? Do you feel a certain kind of expectancy and glad look- ing forward when you awake in the morning as to what the events of the day may bring to you ? Or is it with an uneasy, disappointed, and somewhat guilty feeling that you find yourself when consciousness returns ? Have you come to feel how insincere and degen- erate all the people around you have be- come, and how few people can really be trusted in the world to-day, and how little true religion there is, and what a hard time you have had, harder than any one else ? Then there is something wrong with you. Not with life, nor with your fate or lot, but simply with you, with your own character. As the mother told her boy, you are one of the uninteresting good people who have lost their interest in the problems of life, and so have become uninteresting. What you need is more religion. Always remember that when the world looks hopelessly black to you, it shows that there is something wrong, not half so much with the world as with you. When a patient calls in the doctor and tells him that the house and the room and the out- side have turned yellow, the doctor does not take a brush and pail of whitewash to whiten the whole world up again. No. He says, "My dear sir, or madam, your liver must be a little out of order and your whole system needs toning up." He does not say a single word about whitening up the world. So the world does not need to [ 13 ] THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING be converted half so much as you need to be converted. For one of the first tests of a true Christian is that he should enjoy life. This is the meaning of all our Christian phraseology, — forgiveness, trust, blessed- ness, service, faith, love. These are the ultimate terms in which we express the Christian life; all unhappy terms only express passing and incomplete phases of it. Several of the writers in the New Testa- ment look at life as a game, and it has this in common with all true games, that to play it you must take the risks, obey the rules, and enjoy it. It is the greatest game of all. Some people mistake it for a less interesting game than it really is One man thinks it is a game of gobang, where the point is to add as many ciphers to the sum of his personal fortune as he possibly can. Another man thinks it is a game of roulette, where the results depend entirely upon chance, and nothing else counts ex- cept perhaps an occasional act of dis- honesty. Another man thinks it is a game of cards, where skill counts for something and chance perhaps for a great deal more. Another man thinks it is a tug of war, where all that counts is pull, either in the literal or metaphorical sense, but where brains count for very little. We have all met people who are conducting their lives upon one or another of these theories. But in reality life is a far more interesting game than any of these players imagine ; none of r H i © ® ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING them are playing it for all it is worth. They have not begun to exhaust its pos- sibilities. It is far more like a good game of football, where in good play chance has but small influence, but where skill and brains and physical fitness count for a good deal, and where in the end the ultimate success of the game, as a game, depends most of all upon the ability to play fair and hard and keep one's temper. A game is a failure if you do not feel an intense interest in it. The best game is the game in which you lose yourself most com- pletely. And I say it sympathetically and tenderly but assuredly, that no matter what your fate or lot has been, you are not play- ing your best in the game of life unless its problems and dark mysteries have aroused in you intense interest and an emulation to play your part, in spite of all difficulties, in true sportsmanlike manner. It is the sense of religion preeminently that adds zest to our living. Three things are necessary for a really interesting game. There must be some risk, whether it be the mild venture in- volved in the chance of losing your men at a game of checkers, or the more terrible chance of breaking a collar-bone at foot- ball — - no game is a game without the ele- ment of risk. Without risk a game is merely a puzzle. Now it is religion which inspires us to take the highest risks of all, to risk all for God. In order to begin to live every one has to take some risks ; you show your [ 15 1 ,® ® ® ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING character by the character of the risks which you take. The irreligious man and the immoral man take the lower, less in- teresting risks of the world; they accept the risk that in the end the worldly-wise man may prove to be a fool and to have lost the very best things the world has to offer — love and faith and disinterested service. But the religious man accepts the higher and more glorious risks which give interest to his play and to himself. The irreligious man misses the thrilling, ro- mantic interest which comes from playing the game for all it is worth upon faith in the great, unseen realities of God and immor- tality. "How hard and discouraging your life here must be," said a visitor to an over- worked city missionary amid the depressing squalor of his district. "Hard!' he an- swered — "y es > it is hard, but, oh, what fun it is!" That has been the attitude towards life of all the greatest missionaries and servants of God whom I have met, Paton and Chalmers and Grenfell. And, strange to say, these are the men whom the boy with whom we began our discussion would not find uninteresting. And I am sure that the real reason why they are good and yet not uninteresting is just the reason the mother gave, because they have more religion than the rest of us. The second thing essential to a good game is the intellectual interest which comes from attempting to keep the rules. The more intricate and difficult the situa- [ 16 ] © CCS ® ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING tions in the game become, the greater the interest in trying to win the game while obeying the rules. It is easy to win almost any game by cheating, but the real player wants to win the game fairly. The re- ligious man gets more fun out of the game of life because he is the man who is trying fairly to keep the rules. He tries to thread his way honestly among the thousand and one problems of right and wrong which meet him in daily life. Of course it is hard ; what game is worth anything which every one can play perfectly right off? It is in trying to apply the principles of religion to the intricate affairs of his every-day life that a man gets the intellectual stimulus of a good game. The wrong way is always the laziest, the least stimulating way; it is the line of easiest resistance, and the man who always moves along that line loses in the end his interest in life, for he loses his power of choosing between two paths, and in this power lies the heart of the interest in all games. How grand is the problem of the religious man ! It is how to be suc- cessful and happy and beloved while at the same time keeping God's rules of right and wrong, while being just and honest and sympathetic and true. It is religion, then, which inspires us to play hard, to play fair, and, lastly, to play to win. For the last essential of a good game is that we should have something to play for. Some play for the prize, some for relaxation, some for strength; all play for [ 17 ] ® ® © THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING something they long to gain. What prize does religion offer us ? In this world a body worn out in the service of our fellows, con- stant strain and effort, many failures to effect that at which we aimed, continual disappointments, suspicions here and there of unfair tactics on the part of the other side? Yes, all these things the players at the game of life must endure during the game, but what game worth the name de- mands less from its devotees ? The prize that life offers to those who live aright is, first of all, the continual joy of participation in the finest game in the world, and beyond that an assurance which no real player can doubt, that our side is going to win in the end. What that winning means none of us can even dream of. There is a prize beyond the mere joy of playing, for this is a game for the upbuilding and strengthening, not of the body and mind merely, but of the char- acter, and God has some glorious use for those spiritual athletes who fit themselves through the discipline of this life for greater and happier achievement beyond. © © 1 H E K [ 1 S HI I IN a LIFE'S A JEST S ITRANGE as it may seem, it was an old Scotch elder who said, "The want of a sense of humor is the unpardonable sin." It is true that its absence is almost a sin, for a man's attitude towards life is not wholesome if he be without it. And the humorless state is so hopeless as to be al- most unpardonable, the proverbial surgical operation for the purpose of introducing a joke into a hard head not yet having been invented. It is an unpardonable sin, for life in some of its aspects is a jest, and the only righteous and rational attitude of human beings towards life in many of its manifestations is deep, hearty laughter. The sense of humor at its best is one of the deepest things in life. It is a spiritual per- ception of the vast, incongruous discrep- ancy which exists between things as they seem and things as they really are. It is not, then, as is so generally supposed, one of the superficial elements of life. It is part of all that is healthiest and noblest in humanity. The plan of life and the infinitely subtle adjustments of nature teach us of the in- tellectual power of the divine mind; we can infer from the beauty of the world that God loves beautiful things; so from the [ 19 ] ® ® ® © © THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING humorous vein which runs through real life we must read back to a deep sense of humor in the divine mind. "He that sit- teth in the heavens shall laugh." There is a spark of omniscience in all real laughter. Most of our humorous appreciation springs from our delighted comparison between the two sides of a thing, the apparent and the inner. We are delighted that we have got the inside view, and the thought of the deceptive appearance of the outside makes us chuckle with an omniscient feeling of superiority. A truly omniscient view of the world, the absolute comparison between its outer appearance and its inner reality, cannot fail to be a tender and sympathetic view and yet also deeply humorous. The career, for instance, of a seemingly success- ful rogue must be very humorous when viewed in its completeness by the omnis- cient eye, as it is seen clearly how, in spite of all his self-confidence, his tricks and subterfuges, he is inevitably working out, step by step, his own disclosure and ruin. Sin is not only sad, it is ridiculous when seen by wisdom in its true light. There is subject for laughter as well as for tears in the complete view of the life of any man of whom it cannot be said, "What- ever record leap to light, he never will be shamed !" There is eternal irony in the fruitless attempt to establish a kingdom of darkness in God's world of light. This is true in Shakespeare's view of life, for his mind partakes more of omnis- [ SO ] ® ® ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING cience in his knowledge of human charac- ter than that of any other of modern times. With Shakespeare we can laugh at the worst rogues, and feel that we do right to laugh, because he makes us laugh not merely at their wit, but oftentimes at the essential ridiculousness of sin in itself. He makes us do this with full sympathy for all that is left wholesome in the sinner, such as his lively fancy and inventiveness. Yet under all that, our chief delight springs from our appreciation of the comic irony in the contrast between the serious, sinful intention of the rascal and the way in which he is actually ultimately defeating his own end. Unfortunately Christ's reporters had not much of this virtue, and have transmitted to us merely stray glimpses of the humor of their Master. Traces of a gentle irony, however, run all through the Gospel narra- tives, often hardly appreciated by the writer or the reader. "Beautifully" (/caXaW), Christ says in Mark 7 : 9, "do ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your tradition." And there is quiet humor in the way in which the phrase "with per- secutions ' ' is inserted at the end of the list of the "houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands," which those who followed him would re- ceive now in this time. That a genuine humorous appreciation of the intrinsic ridiculousness of the sin does not necessarily detract from one's [ 21 ] ® ® ® ® THE KEEN JOT OF LIVING moral detestation of it is shown in the humorous description Jesus gives of the manner in which the "hypocrites" go forth to do an act of charity, " sounding a trumpet before them in the synagogues and in the streets." "Verily I say unto you," adds Jesus three times as he thinks of their easy success in gaining the publicity they desired, — "Verily I say unto you, They have their reward." Such gleams of the humor of Jesus have half-unconsciously strayed into the narratives of his serious- minded reporters. We are glad even of these faint hints of what the Master's humor must have been, because to-day this sense seems to us an indispensable quality in every broad, lovable character. Such humorous appreciation as that we have been speaking of springs from sub- lime faith in God, from the absolute assur- ance that in spite of adverse appearances God's great, good plan is being surely worked out to its final consummation everywhere. Faith, hope, love, and the sense of humor, no one of these can be present in its fulness perhaps without the other, but all are nec- essary to one who is seriously struggling to help this sinful, suffering world. There is a humorous side to ignorance, jealousy, thanklessness, and immaturity, and these are the chief causes of worry with those who are sincerely trying to work for the good of society. Blessed is the man who can bear the sin of the world upon his heart till he has done his best to heal it, and [ ** 1 @ © 3) THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING then, when it threatens to load him down with useless worry, is able to side-track it all on to the lines of humor, and laugh with all his soul at the hypocrites with their trumpets and the Pharisee with his pre- posterous prayer. The great moral issues of the life outside of us have, then, their essential humor, their comic irony, the thought of which is ever a relief in times of depression to bring us back from desperate, fanatic earnestness to human sanity again, and to the remem- brance of the great, good, abiding, change- less facts of life. But our own lives are even more fertile in humor for us than is the life of the world. The absence of a sense of humor is almost always accompanied by self-conceit, be- cause the poor man defective in this re- spect accepts himself among the serious facts of life. All incidents which have happened to him have become thereby events of general interest. But as long as you can genuinely laugh at yourself, at your ridiculous pretensions to be somebody and know something, at the terrible disparity between your friends' opinion of your powers and your own more intimate knowledge of your own slipshod, faulty work, — as long as you can sin- cerely recognize at times with laughter your own insignificance in the universe, as long as you refuse to take yourself entirely seriously, so long is your soul not lost. Stevenson could heartily laugh at himself; [ 23 ] ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING Thackeray could wonder why, as he said, people did not discover what an old fraud he really was. Even Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," is not hopeless, because, as Dowden says, "through his soft veil of silliness and imbecility glim- mers for a moment the faint suspicion that he is an ass." So far we have considered two great sources of the refreshing stream of the humor of life, — first, in the faith that while the world is not finished (hence the incon- gruity), yet it seems to be coming all right (hence the possibility of laughter) ; second, in the vast dissimilarity between the ideal which we know in our mind constitutes good work and our ow r n laborious and much vaunted achievement. But a great portion of the genuine humor of the world arises from a third source, — from a recog- nition of those great spheres of life which are neither moral nor immoral, but simply non-moral. We have seen that the sense of humor saves us from fanaticism and egoism ; from this third point of view it is an emotional antiseptic and delivers us from all eager and shrill intensity. We are saved thereby from the slush of sentimentalism. There are facts in life which ought not to be made the text for a sermon, but rather the subject for a joke. The esthetic bride and bride- groom of DuMaurier's picture in Punch are discussing their newly acquired six-mark teapot with intense expressions of artistic [ 24 ] © u) © ® © THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING fervor — it is " divine ' and "consum- mate. " At last the bride, carried away by her enthusiasm, says, "O Algernon, let us live up to it !" A sense of humor saves us from praying that we may live up to teapots and from everlasting preaching. Humor from this point of view is the mark of the man who is relating things to an- other and so doing a little thinking. Wit brings into relation the superficial incon- gruities of things in a manner to excite our delighted surprise. The pun, for instance, relates words to one another in unexpected, incongruous ways. Humor finds in the deeper things of life the same unexpected likenesses and unlikenesses, the same dis- similarity between appearance and reality, the same oddities and vagabond relations, as wit finds in mere words and intellectual technique. Harmony in the relations of thought excites our admiration, difficulty in relating facts to one another excites mental effort and logical thought. But every now and again we come upon a rela- tion in the world of thought which does not excite us to admiration by its harmony, or jar upon us and stimulate us by its difficulty and mystery, but which makes us laugh by its very defiance of all laws and "gives us a sudden glory for a moment, a holiday from the schoolroom of exact thought and serious effort." Humor in modern times is pene- trating deeper and deeper into life. The mere pun is despised. Humor is becoming more and more thoughtful. By t 25 ] ,© ® ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING this is meant that thought had penetrated deeply into the mysteries of life before the humorous relation of things to each other was discovered. Humor presupposes cer- tain trains of thought, and these presup- positions are often best conveyed to the popular mind through their gratuitous jangling in humor rather than in their harmonious logical sequence. Many of the most noxious errors have been laughed out of court. The recognition of this great holiday world of humor is an essential in the happy and useful life to-day. It is often the third way of escape in life's most unpleasant dilemmas. It saves one from the necessity of telling many a lie and committing many a discourtesy. Escape to this world of humor when busybodies come asking you questions they have no business to ask; when the insincere, thoughtless questioner tries to disprove the noble faith of life. When the world has grown dark for you and you are lonely, do not enter upon long evenings of auto- suggestive worrying about things in general, but take down your Don Quixote and read how "Don Quixote could not help smiling at the simplicity of Sancho. ,: It is the mark of breadth of mind, of the mind that tries to see things in all their relations. It is the great humanizer, it is absolutely democratic, it can laugh at everything except the ulti- mate harmonies of life which excite worship and admiration. It is the mark of the idealist who fears no comparisons even the [ *& ] ® r ® ® © THE KEEN JOT OF LIVING most incongruous, because he is so sure that the ultimate reality is noble and right. It shows us the funny side of the worst mis- fortune. Stevenson with a smile could call the disease which he knew was killing him, "Bloody Jack." It permits a continual innocent escape from restraint and con- vention. And yet, like all valuable posses- sions, it is most dangerous. It is much easier to be a righteous man without it than with it. It is onlv safe in the life of one who loves the great harmonies of existence, honor and kindness and morality and justice, a thousand times more than he does all the "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of humor. Yet to succeed in life one must know what things are not to be taken seriously, and to the man in tune with the universe there is always a point of view from which "Life's a Jest." ©, © © iIFE'S an art; your one talent together with all your limitations and temptations and drudgeries are raw material out of which it is your task to produce a work of art, a beautiful life. Life's a game; enter it with all your heart and soul. Play it for all it is worth. Whether in triumph or defeat, manifest the true sportsmanlike qualities, — adventurous daring, hardihood, and fair play. Life's a jest; nothing is finished, every- thing is in the making, the world is still full of odd-looking tag-ends of circum- stance, and humorously deceptive ap- pearances of things. Be not so woodenly serious that you cannot see sometimes how very funny it all looks. Yes, all through the day our common art inspires us to admiration and achieve- ment. Playing full-heartedly ourselves and cheering on our fellow players in the game, we spend the long hours of sunlight, laughing and rejoicing merrily through it all. But in the evening comes the time when the children are tired, — when they cease trying to do things for themselves, and gather in the gloaming round their mother for a story. Tired of the real world with its hard knocks and lost toys and petty dis- [ 28 1 ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING appointments, they turn to the ideal world. They want a fairy-story. Such times come to us all, when we do not need to be spurred to artistic achieve- ment, or to be urged to play our parts like true men and women, and when all mere laughter seems out of place. We want to know now not our own duty ; that is clear enough. We want some deeper explana- tion of life and all things. We want to hear the voice of some mother-love in the gloam- ing telling us a wondrous fairy-tale that is truer far than are all the shapes seen dimly in the shadows around us. Then to our souls the great Father and Mother Spirit takes up the story of the ideal reality of things, and life for us becomes a fairy- tale. These common things of every day, the voice seems to tell us, are not really what they seem, — these toys upon the floor, and this fire, this room, this life. All things mean more than they seem. All common things are transformed into strange, new creatures, and become pos- sessed of strange, new powers, in fairy-land. For fairy-land is the real world which lies just within this, seeming world. Then we learn this last great lesson, that religion is comfort. It is religion that gives meaning to life, then, through all these earlier stages we have spoken of; now it is religion which adds the last touch to the mellowing of the full and true humanity which it has inspired and strengthened and made glad in earlier years. [39 ] THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING The charm of the true fairy-tale lies in two things, — that anything may happen, and that it all turns out well in the end. Anything may happen. Cinderella has only her pumpkin and her mouse-trap. But the pumpkin suddenly one day be- comes a fine coach gilded all over with gold, and the six mice in the mouse-trap when touched by the wand become six horses of a beautiful mouse-colored dapple- gray. Never despair in the fairy-story of your life; anything may happen. In the end the best is truest. This is the good news of religion. It is a message of hope. Do not despair over the dark experience which has come into your life. Suddenly, after years, the terrible dragon which has kept you in fearful bondage and trem- bling so long is touched by the wand of time, of forgiveness, of new insight, and it becomes a fairy-prince golden and glorious, ready to conduct you into a new world. Your kitchen and your pumpkin ? Who knows what they may become if only touched by religion's magic wand ? Your narrow home may become a Bethel, the very house of God, the very gate of heaven. THE KEEN JOT OF LIVING point of swallowing the defenseless, beauti- ful princess. Do not recoil from the story in horror. Go on with it bravely. It is going to turn out all right in the end. The fairy prince will come to hand just in time to save his future bride. Something like this is the comfort of the long, broad, deep view of life which religion gives us. The children around are breathlessly waiting for the great surprise which always comes towards the end of the story. They can only dimly surmise as they look forward how the hero and the heroine are going to be safely delivered from the treachery and injustice which surround them, but they implicitly trust the love which has made their home of life so pleasant, to satisfy them with this life-story in the end. So religion teaches us that somehow, we can- not yet fully understand how, it is all well with the noble soul. There is a great secret. "Pain is not the fruit of pain." There is a mystical truth, only half guessed, only half experienced still. The words are long and hard to understand, and we children can only half surmise all their meaning, — Atoning Love, Life Eternal, Everlasting Reunion, Immortality. What can we children do but picture to ourselves wonderful childish pictures of what they all mean ? Surely these words which so constantly recur in the tale tell of some wondrous surprise at the end of the story. Yes, this is the last and most glorious of the uses of religion, that to every noble r si ] ® THE KEEN JOY OF LIVING soul it says in a voice so intimate and true and tender that it is its own best evidence : " But hush : for you there can be no despair ; There's amends. 'Tis a secret. Hope and pray." ™f,?,S.^ Y OF CONGRESS i . < »*"* 021 060 341 4