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