THE HAPPY LIFE. My subject is "The Happy Life." I address here especially young people who have passed the period of childhood, with its unreflecting gayety, passing shadows, gusty griefs, and brief despairs, and have entered, under conditions of singular privilege, upon rational and responsible living. For you happiness must be conscious, considerate, and consistent with habits of observing, reading and reflecting. Now reflecting has always been a grave business, 66 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow and it must be confessed that our times present some new obstacles to a life of considerate happiness. Until this century the masses of mankind were almost dumb; but now their moans and complaints have become audible through telephone, telegraph and rotary press. The millions are now saying what the moody poets have always said: "The flower that smiles to-day To-morrow dies. All that we wish to stay Tempts and then flies. What is this world's delight? The gloomy moralist is still repeating: "I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and behold! all is vanity and vexation of spirit." The manual laborers of to-day,who are much better off than the same classes of laborers have been in any earlier times, are saying just what Shelley said to the men of England in 1819: "The seed ye sow another reaps, The wealth ye find another keeps, The robes ye weave another wears, They would adopt without change the words in which that eminent moralist, Robinson Crusoe, a century earlier, described the condition of the laboring classes: "The men of labor spent their strength in daily struggling for bread to maintain the vital strength they labored with; so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread." Matthew Arnold calls his love to come to the window and listen to the "melancholy, long withdrawing roar" of the sea upon the moonlit beach at Dover; and these are his dismal words to her : "Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, The poets are by no means the only offenders; the novelists and scientists take their turn. The fiction of this century deals much with the lives of the wretched, dissolute and vicious, and with the most unjust and disastrous conditions of modern society. A fresh difficulty in the way of natural happiness is the highly speculative opinion, lately put forward by men of science and promptly popularized, to the effect that external nature offsets every good with an evil, and that the visible universe is unmoral, or indifferent as regards right and wrong, revealing no high purpose or intelligent trend. This is, indeed, a melancholy notion; - but that it should find acceptance at this day, and really make people miserable, only illustrates the curious liability of the human intelligence to sudden collapse. The great, solid conviction which science, within the past three centuries, has enabled thinking men and women to settle down on, is that all discovered and systematized knowledge is as nothing compared with the undiscovered, and that a boundless universe of unimagined facts and forces interpenetrates and encompasses what seems the universe to us. spite of this impregnable conviction people distress themselves because, forsooth, they cannot discern the moral purpose or complete spiritual intent of this dimly seen, fractional universe which is all we know. Why should they discern it? In It is, then, in spite of many old and some new discouragements that we are all seeking the happy life. We know that education spreads, knowledge grows, and public liberty develops; but can we be sure that public and private happiness increase? What the means and sources of happiness are in this actual world, with our present surroundings, and with no reference to joys or sorrows in any other world, is a natural, timely and wholesome inquiry. We may be sure that one principle will hold throughout the whole pursuit of considerate happiness-the principle that the best way to secure future happiness is to be as happy as is rightfully possible to-day. To secure any desirable capacity for the future, near or remote, cultivate it to day. What is the use of immortality for a person who cannot use well half an hour? asks Emerson. In trying to enumerate the positive satisfactions which an average man may reasonably expect to enjoy in this world, I, of course, take no account of those too common objects of human pursuit, wealth, power and fame; first, because they do not as a rule contribute to happiness; and secondly, because they are unattainable by mankind in general. I invite you to consider only those means of happiness which the humble and obscure millions may possess. The rich and famous are too few to affect appreciably the sum of human happiness. I begin with the satisfactions of sense. Sensuous pleasures, like eating and drinking, are sometimes described as animal, and therefore unworthy. It must be confessed, however, that men are, in this life, animals all through-whatever else they may beand that they have a right to enjoy without reproach those pleasures of animal existence which maintain health, strength and life itself. Familiar ascetic and pessimistic dogmas to the contrary notwithstanding, these pleasures, taken naturally and in moderation, are |