Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1883 — The Ethics of Enjoyment. [ARTICLE]

The Ethics of Enjoyment.

The gift es enjoying life should be ranked among the most desirable of talents. When our forefather solemnly incorporated into their Declaration of Independence the assertion that men were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of. happiness, they gave official recognition and emphasis to the importance of happiness as an element es national life. As a rule we ignore it individually. We are apt to consider happiness from the Carlylean standpoint as something that “man can do without.” We are apt to have an undefined feeling that we are not doing our whole duty if we are happy; that it is a species of dilettantism or idle and childish self-indulgence. This is our Puritan inheritance, and one that still lingers perceptibly with us. Diderot, in his “Paradoxe sur le Comedien,”says: “But look around you, and you will see that people of never-failing gayety have neither great faults nor merits; that as a < rule people who lay themselves out to be agreeable are frivolous people, without any sound principle, and that those who, like certain persons who mix in our society, have no character, excel in playing all.” In this the French critic expresses a very universal sentiment and one that is apt to be accepted sans analysis. • But it is not true that happiness is really our nomal condition, and that any failure to realize it should suggest to us a violation of laws and warp us to seek the remedy and restoration ? Of course, if happiness is adjudged to be entirely dependant on things, and to require at least SIO,OOO a year for its support, it is a practically unattainable to most of us. But if we relegate it to its true place as a spiritual condition, we hold the keys that unlock for us the gates of destiny. Happiness is moral and intellectual sanity, as health is physical “the pursuit of happiness,” which is scoured to us as a constitutional right, is a very laudable and feasible occupation. Nine-tenths of our anxiety, our worry, our fancied trials, is wholly useless. Not that it is entirely without basis but its realities consist of conditions that can be dissipated, and even ignored. Life is too short to waste on idle or unavailing regret. It is wiser .to look up than down; to look forward rather than backward, —and the life that holds itself in true polarity to hope, and oheerfulness, and sunshine, is in itself the life of permanent and blessed suooess. “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”— Boston Traveller.

Am Alabama girl, 3 years old, on going to the window early one foggy morning, cried out: “On, come here and look, mamma. The sky is all orammed down to the ground 1” The remains of George Whitefield, the eminent divine, lie buried beneath the pulpit of the' old Presbyterian .Church at Newburyport, Mass.