force it into the entertainments of the heart; and because it is painful to draw it forth by a sharp and salutary repentance, he still rolls and turns upon his wound, and carries his death in his bowels, where it first entered by choice, and then dwelt by love, and at last shall finish the tragedy by divine judgments and unalterable decree. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. DAVID SWING. All pursuits are pursuits of happiness. The young men who are standing in presence of a group of professions, try to select one which will yield them not only a support but also the most of happiness. No man will of his own accord select an avocation against which his heart recoils. So universally does man seek personal happiness, and so widely does society in its organized forms seek this destination, that many philosophers have declared happiness to be the final motive of all conduct-that all other motives are but shapes of this one all-prevailing influence. It is indeed true that no act of life can be found in which this reward of being may not be seen as a possible motive, or at least as an expectation, but that all acts are done from considerations of the final welfare of the doer may well be denied, for without very clear proof we should not make man a creature of only self-interest. It is evident that all good conduct and all good character are inevitably joined with that result called happiness, and this is perhaps as far as the common mind can see in this direction in the spiritual world. While philosophers are ardently and almost vainly attempting to learn whether all actions and all virtue are to be explained by the influence of this one pursuit, this truth remains for the common public, namely: that the pursuit of happiness, enjoyment, pleasure, is one of the most immense chases in which the human multitude ever joins. There are some who do not seek riches-perhaps because they were born into an old wealth which in generations has not increased nor diminished, or perhaps they were born so poor that the thought of riches is a hopeless dream-and there are persons who do not seek a home, or a name or culture; but persons who do not seek pleasure one can with difficulty discover. This crusade is one in which all join and march to this music in front of the mighty procession. Not every single individual of the human family has marched to this music, but no one shape of motive has come so near making a unit in one particular of the races and epochs of man. The history of the exceptions, could we find them, would reveal to us only more clearly the fact that the Creator designed that all his creatures should seek, to a greater or less degree, personal pleasure. At least those who have attempted to shun the smiles and laughter and joys of earth, have found their method to be, not a form of development, but a blight. In almost all histories of old lands we find a band of asceticism or stoicism drawn across the great page—a black line in this wide spectrum. Some disappointed priest of some god, or some baffled politician, or some baffled lover, or some unbalanced brain, has gone out from almost every state of the past, and in some desert has founded an order and a philosophy, whose cardinal idea has been that man should mortify all his feelings and look upon all pleasure as a weakness. Before our era came with its Christian hermits, old India and Arabia, and the Nile Valley, poured forth these streams of monasticism. The Eremite was a man who fled from civilization and took to the desert (eremos, a desert), that he might escape pleasure. But even these the inborn love of happiness followed, for when one of these had made his cell or lodge in the bleak sand or rocks, he soon managed to have company, and thus soon a hundred or a thousand hermits assembled in one valley or mountain or plain, that they who scorned all pleasure might have the pleasure of companionship. Although they ate in perfect silence and with faces unrelieved for years by a smile, and ate only little bread and oil and salt, and sat on a little bunch of straw by day, which bundle became a pillow at night, yet they wished the pleasure of society and always located in such a manner that each could see some companions of the common misery. In India, where the most miserable selftorturers exist, these seekers of suffering go in groups that they may have the pleasure of the company of each other. Thus these sets of men who have set forth with the cardinal doctrine of denying self, have hastened to gratify self by demanding the presence of companions. Thus has asceticism failed to root out from the heart the motive of happiness, because where it has vowed to be miserable it has asked the pleasure of companions in the distress; [it asked the happiness of being seen. When this eccentricity of human nature passed over from the Pagan to the Christian world, it could not by any effort become a perfect selfdenial, for the recluses, the hermits and the monks, all betrayed points at which they wanted happiness to come in, and so rapidly did these points multiply and enlarge, that at last a monastery became a place where there was plenty of good food and good wine and good hearty laughter. To be fat and jolly as a monk became the quality at last of those orders whose founders had left the world that the body and soul might escape its sensual pleasures. Thus so stubborn is the natural law of pleasure that men who have set forth to oppose it have been found at last fatter and redder of face and jollier than those who remained away from this contest with the flesh and the devil. Again: in so far as individuals have succeeded in overcoming the smile and joy of earth, to that distance have they also blighted the other natural powers of the soul. In the effort to overthrow pleasure, these men have dragged down all else. The mind hastens to pass into a stupor when it has become convinced that there is nothing around it worth living for. The more the ascetic-be he Pagan or Christian, be he Stoic or a Fakir or a Monk-limits the horizon of pleasure in the best sense of that word, the more he limits the outreachings of the mind and heart, and contracts the powers and works of his life. A suicide is a man whose heart has become perfectly emptied of joy and the hope of it; and next to the suicide stands the ascetic, who holds the theory of the suicide but in a less real form; he has the faith or creed of the suicide, but has not yet risen to his practice. A classic orator once spoke so powerfully about the worthlessness of human existence that his addresses were always followed by a sudden increase of suicides. We who from our happier era look back, cannot but feel that the hatred some of our ancestors cherished for pleasure, made the world seem so small and ill-deserving that they did not care to extend toward it their esteem or their charity. From the years which they had sown broadcast with their hatred of laughter, they reaped a harvest of indifference and coldness of soul. It mattered little to them how much their neighbor or their enemy suffered, for suffering was a dignified condition of body and mind, and was not half so weak a thing as loud enjoyment. If this stoicism enabled some men to be martyrs and to sing songs at the stake, it also made them willing to make martyrs of others and to sing cheerfully at the burning of bodies other than their own. If asceticism had but one side to it-the ability to endure ills-it might pass for a virtue; but it has always another side; the power to inflict ills-a vice to which a willingness to have one's thumb twisted or right hand burned is an inadequate compensation. Thus the heroism of Cranmer and More and Knox had its dark side, for the severity of philosophy which enabled them to endure well, made them equally powerful to inflict. The power to repel happiness has been too often joined to the inability to care for the happiness of others. It is no doubt true that some of the iron-hearted men in the past did great good in their day, but one may well be glad that their day has passed by, and that with the passing away of the men who could hold their hand in a blaze until it were consumed have passed away, also the men who could without flinching hold in the same blaze the hands of other people. Let us have instead of iron men, souls sensitive to joy and pain, for these only can measure fully the joy and pain of another. A sensibility to one's own happiness is pre-requisite to a conception of the happiness of others. How can man be anxious to bestow upon another that of which he himself knows but little? No doubt the poet Milton possessed immense learning and immense powers and heroism; but if the story be true, his daughters, who are pictured as reading so affectionately to their blind father and the nephews about the Miltonian home, must have had often convincing proof that their Paradise at least had been long lost. Much of the prose of Milton is marked by a ferocity of which our times can furnish no parallel. Having but one life to live, and having the choice of all times, one would be justified in locating his span of existence in a happiness-seeking age, for only such an age would care for your tears and make any effort to dry them. Iron men are noble to bear, but hard to be borne. When Christianity has in any way been made into a severe state of philosophy or character, this bad result has been achieved by a wandering away from Christ and by a linking together of Mosaic law and Christian gospel. When our ancestors condemned and executed witches, they quoted Exodus 22:18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." When the Christian Church began to put to death all those who rejected its line of belief, it studied and imitated the example of Moses and Joshua in their extermination of the Canaanites. The early Christian Church studied, not its Founder, Christ, but its imaginary predecessor, the Mosaic Church, and put to death millions of non-believers because the Mosaic model had cut down the Pagans root and branch. Many of these olden-time writers explain persecution by quoting from Deuteronomy. One of them, Simancas, says that persecution to death is right, because in the 17th chapter of Deuteronomy we are told that stubborn unbelievers must be burned in sight of all the people, and that idolaters must be led outside the gates and there be stoned to death. Our own ancestors, when they made the penal code of Connecticut, founded it as far as possible upon the Pentateuch. Again and again at the end of a law they cite the holy precedent for such an act of legislation. For example, we find on the code this Blue Law: "If any child or children about sixteen years old and of sufficient understanding, shall curse or smite their natural father or mother, he or they shall be put to death. See Exodus 21:17; Lev. 20:9; Ex. 21:15." Again, “If a man have a stubborn son who will not obey the voice of his father or mother, and that when they shall have chastised him he will not hearken unto them, then shall they bring him before the magistrate and testify that their son is stubborn and rebellious, and will not obey their voice and ehastisement, but lives in sundry and notorious crimes, such a son shall be put to death. See Deut 21:20." You may study all you will and can the alleged cruelty of Christianity, and you will find it all to have come from the assumption that Moses brought the perpetual will of God to earth, and that Christ and Moses were linked in an equal and everlasting partnership. Out of this assumption has come an endless amount of cruelty and blood and tears and sorrow. But the moment you dissolve this terrible companionship between the thunder of Sinai and the Sermon on the Mount you perceive that Christianity comes bringing happiness and asking you to carry happiness to all within your part of society. Christ in his own true isolation was not an ascetic, but an advocate of human cheerfulness. There were no tears of sympathy falling down through the Mosaic times, such as rained down through the Bethlehem skies when Christ went from home to home and village to village, cheering all, and healing all, and blessing all. The time for burning the skeptical and stoning to death the idolater rolled away like a black cloud after the Advent, and the new dispensation was seen blessing all, comforting the mourner, holding in its arms little children. The austerity of the Mosaic era Christ would not permit to envelop even the Sabbath, much less all the days of the week, for passing through the wheatfields on Sunday, he commanded his companions to eat cheerfully of the sweet wheat, since the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for a Sabbath. At the wedding feast Christ harmonized with the festival and helped fill the wine-cup of the happy hours. Those lilies which Christ saw were not seen by the bloody men that put to death so willingly the Amorite and the Perrizite, but they were trampled down by the rush of the horsemen and the iron chariots. In Christ you will perceive just that sensibility of soul which loves at once the happiness of self and the joy of all mankind. This must be said over all history, not only of Mosaic times but of Gospel times, and all early periods: that it omits to picture to us the laugh and smile and delight of man, and exhausts its time upon those wars and events and characters which overthrew thrones or set up thrones or changed the maps of nations. History is a filing in and out of soldiery. It is a march of kings and queens. In all its long period no happy children are seen; no feast is spread, unless like Belshaz zer's it is to be followed by some calamity, and some poet is about to say: "Hour to the empire's overthrow The princes to the feast are gone;" no marriage bell rings; no mirth-making stories are told; no young people dance in the large halls. As kings were the large things of the by-gone cen turies, around them moved all the chronicles of events from Ezra to Gibbon, each writer composing his book as on a shield, and dipping his pen in an inkstand made of a skull or of a helmet. Looking into such a record our fathers shaped religion to fit this funeral gloom, and gave us a worship in whose sombre presence pleasure partook of the quality of a sin or of a weakness. This being true, it is the privilege and duty of our time to note the injustice of history and to affirm that Christianity is in full sympathy with that vast love of pleasure that fills up the mortal soul. Gloomy religionists inquire whether Christ ever laughed, and whether St. Paul ever joined in a dance!-as though there were a most withering rebuke to the inquiry. This we know: that history has never given us the picture of man in his home and joys and laughter and all delights, but only of man as swaying a scepter or as making a speech or writing a poem or founding a religion; and hence you who love pleasure need not ask Josephus or Tacitus or Livy or Hume or Gibbon to show you a precedent; you may cast your case upon the wisdom of a different court that of reason-or you may re-write history and omit the battle-field and the monarch, and fill your pages with common men, women and children, from all lands and all generations. Thus studying man you will find that the pursuit of happiness has quickened his genius and the beating of his heart all along his great highway, from the old Eden to the fresh and new America. Happinss thus reevealing itself as a lawful and noble and universal pursuit, it must now be asked what happiness is it that is so lawful and noble? It must be a happiness that does not conflict with morality. Pleasure sought by a violation of any law of health or of conscience or of society, is only a pain delayed. The so-called "daughters of joy" are the daughters of infinite grief. And the appeal to the drunkard's glass for happiness is only placing a heavy mortgage upon the soul in good times to be paid with heavy interest when times are bad. The pleasure of the gambler, the betting man, and generally the fashionable man, is only an inflation of to-day at the expense of to-morrow. Happiness is much like money-money must represent an actuality. It must stand for some stored-up labor of individual or nation. If a man has earned a farm or a house or has digged a pot of gold, he may issue bills of paper almost to the amount of value in his farm or house or pot of gold, but should he issue checks or drafts to ten times the value of his realty, his bills must decline to ten cents on the dollar so as to harmonize with his possessions. No man and no state, however powerful, can create a value. No state can make land or make a wheat-crop. Their bills of exchange must represent what is. God alone can create. He might appeal to what might be. It is much thus with pleasure. Man cannot wander much beyond his absolute possession of power and right. An over-drinking and over-eating, an over-tax of mind or body is an over-issue of drafts; and lo, on the morrow, an awful depreciation of body and mind and soul is reported on street and 'change and in the church circles, and in that most tender and tearful place-the home. You see on the streets daily persons, male and female, who years ago discounted too heavily their future, and now the time is out. The health of the body and of the mind, the welfare of self and of society, the eternal laws of God-these are realities upon which all may issue their pleasure-notes, but the instant you go beyond these actualities you become a defaulter-you are no longer in the vale of pleasure, but of pain. It must therefore be true that what we call amusements are things to be regulated rather than sweepingly condemned. The pleasure of the theatre, of games, of the hunt, of the dance, of the dinner, of the party, of the club, must be one that shall not over-tax health or morals or money, or militate against one's avocation. The bounding line between virtue and vice is not always made vividly on life's great plain. Our world was not made for the accommodation of stupid people nor for the growth and increase of stupidity, but to develop the intellect and the judgment. All college students are wont to ask, "Why study this Greek, with its endless details and rules and exceptions? Why not study easier things?" And the grave teachers will say in triumph, there is a vast amount of discipline in Greek. After mastering that all else will be easy. These Greek professors have nature on their side; for nature draws dim lines between virtue and vice, pleasure and pain, and then says: "Find these lines, oh, my children, and you will become as mighty men!" The old church declined the task. It asked for easy studies. It condemned the whole region of faint boundaries. It condemned the drama and the dance and the games, and even laughter and a neat toilet, and fell back on its formulas as being about the only place where reason's trumpet could utter no uncertain sound. A religious conference being unable to distinguish between croquet and billiards, did not admit billiards but they abolished croquet. And now let us come to one more general law about the pursuit of happiness. You perceive tens of thousands setting out from home at times in the pursuit of this winged butterfly. They go to what are called "resorts." They ride and they sail; they eat and they drink, and they make merry. Often this is all well enough, and much of what they seek is found. But it would be a strange law of Nature if man must travel from home in order to find any important form of blessedness. Such a law would give pleasure to only those having some money, and would give it to them only in July and August. Nature does not fill the soul with an immense and universal longing and then bring to this longing such a small outcome. It has made no such failure as this, but, on the opposite, God has made happiness grow up around the very avocations which consume all our days, and around the cities or towns or homes which cherish us when the toil of the day is done. Each profession, each business should be also a pursuit of happiness. Men should so regulate their work, if possible, in its quantity and quality, that they will go to it each morning with pleasure. In all the ten thousand honorable pursuits the toiler in each industry goes cheerfully to his task, for his feelings have fitted themselves to it like a soft glove to the hand. There are men now in the learned professions who came up from a farm; and now in looking back over the long stretch of years they cannot tell when they were happiest-whether it was last year in a public life or in their years of student life, or in those former years when they' were up at dawn in summer to get ready for plowing or harvesting while the grass was still glittering with dew. One may find pleasure by travel and by any form of diversion, but God has so made the world that the great bulk of its joyfulness is to spring up around home and its pursuits. The heart is born into it. And all ye young hearts who are just entering upon this great debate about pleasure, where it is to be found, do not fall into the error that when you become rich then you will try to be happy. Happiness is the most accommodating of all things. It will come to a cottage as soon as a palace. You need never wait for any outward pomp to come. As the sunshine of the Almighty will shine through a simple vine as richly as upon the velvet of a king or upon the gilded dome of a temple, so happiness falls with equal sweetness upon all whose minds are at peace and in whose hearts flow the good thoughts and good sentiments of life. Never for a moment admit that any millionaire or king can surpass you in the possession of that peace of mind and smile of existence which we call happiness. Here you are equal to the highest. Upon duties well done to self and mankind, upon health of soul and body, this dependent vine bears its weight. Pleasure is not a self-sustaining oak, but it is a dependent vine. The great vine of Santa Barbara, which bears tons of grapes each year, which demands almost a field for its arbor, and which has a trunk sixteen inches in diameter, does not stand alone, but wanders to and fro over strong posts, clasping them all in its many arms. Happiness is thus only a dependent, climbing product of the soul's floral world. The many pursuits of man, his industry, his studies, his honor, his home, his philosophy, his shape of religion, are a long series of columns upon which this flowering plant hangs and relies, and from which it shows its blossoms and suspends its fruit. God has made man not only for toil but for his joyfulness. Let no yearning for riches or for office or for any form of vain display, destroy or impede the stream of contentment and peace which the Creator designed should all the year flow through your soul. The fact that religion paints heaven as being a happy land, is enough to point out the lawfulness and attractiveness of happiness; for what is so desirable on the shores of eternity must be a boon to seek and to find on the shores of time. THE MAELSTROM. In the Arctic ocean near the coast of Norway is situated the famous Maelstrom or whirlpool. Many are the goodly ships that have been caught in its circling power, and plunged into the depths below. On a fine spring morning, near the shore opposite, are gathered a company of peasants. The winter and the long night have passed away, and, in accordance with their ancient custom, they are holding a greeting to the return of the sunlight, and the verdure of spring. Under a green shade are spread, in abundance, all the luxuries their pleasant homes could afford. In the grove at one side are heard the strains of music, and the light step of the dance. At the shore lies a beautiful boat, and a party near are preparing for a ride. Soon all things are in readiness, and, amid the cheers of their companions on shore, they push gaily away. The day is beautiful, and they row on, and on. Weary, at length, they drop their oars to rest; but they perceive their boat still moving. Somewhat surprised -soon it occurs to them that they are under the influence of the whirlpool. Moving slowly and without an effort-presently faster, at length the boat glides along with a movement far more delightful than with oars. Their friends from the shore perceive the boat moving, and see no working of the oars; it flashes upon their minds that they are evidently within the circles of the maelstrom. When the boat comes near they call to them, "Beware of the whirlpool!" But they laugh at fear: they are too happy to think of returning. "When we see there is danger then we will return." Oh, that some good angel would come with warning unto them, "Unless ye now turn back ye cannot be saved." Like as the voice of God comes to the soul of the impenitent, "Unless ye mend your ways ye cannot be saved." The boat is now going at a fearful rate; but, deceived by the moving waters, they are unconscious of its rapidity. They hear the hollow rumbling at the water-pool's center. The voices from the shore are no longer audible, but every effort is being used to warn them of their danger. They now, for the first time, become conscious of their situation, and head the boat toward shore. But, like a leaf in the autumn gale, she quivers under the power of the whirlpool. Fear drives them to frenzy! Two of the strongest seize the oars, and ply them with all their strength, and the boat moves toward the shore. With joy they cherish hope! and some, for the first time in all their lives, now give thanks to God-that they are saved. But suddenly, crash goes the oar! and such a shriek goes up from that ill-fated band, as can only be heard when a spirit lost, drops into perdition! The boat whirls again into its death-marked channel, and skips on with the speed of the wind. The roar at the center grinds on their ears, like the grating of prison doors on the ears of the doomed. Clearer, and more deafening is that dreadful roar, as nearer and still nearer the vessel approaches the center; then whirling for a moment on that awful brink, she plunges with her freight of human souls into that dreadful yawning hollow, where their bodies shall lie in their watery graves till the sea gives up its dead! CHARLES A. WILEY. THE RIVER PATH. No bird-song floated down the hill, A tender glow, exceeding fair, |