Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1890 — Beginning to Enjoy Life. [ARTICLE]

Beginning to Enjoy Life.

Americans are just beginning to enjoy life. We are not quite the sober and sad-checked race that we once were. The struggle for existence finds the people better off than they were one and two hundred years ago. There is more abundance and comfort, less cold, hunger and exposure, better food, shelter and clothing. Things can be enjoyed now which could not even exist here previously, for both the comforts and luxuries themselves on one hand and the margin for expenditure on the other have increased and come into being. These have given color and interest to life. The religious belief, too, is more cheerfuL The awful deity of Puritanism has been supplanted by a loving one. Religion now busies itself more with good deeds and human sympathies and less with gloomy introspection. It has fathered a larger faith in the absolute enevolence as well as justice of God, and of the substantial victory of good over evil which this implies. Contact with Germans and Jews, who have migrated to this country and become a part of our environment, is having ns influence. Go to Saratoga and who among the visitors are having the most enjoyment? The Hebrews. Among the work people who are out for a holiday in the park, or the country, or on the water, the Germans show the most hearty devotion to the occasion; and neither are the Irish and other Europeans wanting in this respect. All these influences of better feeding, more leisure, a better religion, a growing aestheticism, larger incomes and possibilities of better living generally, to say nothing of the contagious example of the Germans, the Hebrews and other peoples who know how to enjoy living, are bringing the people of this country into a better enjoyment o 4 life. —Good Housekeeping.