on the high mountain, with even God manifest in the flesh beside him.
He has no holiness, no love, and therefore no peace or joy.

And thus does our joy depend on our fellowship with God in character.
Other things _may_ be, this _must_ be, if we are to be happy. Other
things are required to give our joy fulness; this is essential to
give it existence. For the body may be deprived of all pleasurable
sensation, and the intellect unable to grapple with the simplest
problem, "in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and those
that look out at the windows are darkened, and the daughters of music
are brought low,"--yet the light of joy may still shine in the soul,
so long as the mind can discern that "God is," and the heart feel that
"God is love." Not, therefore, in the gratification of his sentient
tastes; nor in the certainties of pure intellect; nor in science,
which "can put forth its hand and feel from star to star;" nor even in
the exercise of that genius--so like His own creative power!--whose
contrivances change the aspect of the world, and whose glorious
flights can speed to airy regions "which no fowl knoweth nor the
vulture's eye hath seen:" not in those outer courts of God's great
temple has the Father willed that His immortal children shall find
their true life, but in the holy of holies only of His own immediate
presence, and in the possession of the spirit of life and of love
which is in His first-born Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. And this was
the glory and joy which Jesus himself manifested on earth, when "He
had no place to lay his head;" and was "despised and rejected of men;"
and His "countenance was marred like no man's;" when He carried His
cross; and revealed to us that true life which He died to obtain, and
rose from the dead to impart to us by His Spirit. He did not come
to teach us to become artists, orators, or men of mere intellectual
cultivation, capable of creating a hero-worship. The race who