The Toledo chronicle. [volume] (Toledo, Tama County, Iowa) 1873-1924, 1877-10-25
sunday.school Lessons.
The Old Saying.


THERE is an old saying, which has OF
late wears been freely translated into
satire and laughed at as an absurd para
dox. n statement contradicted by the
laws of Nature and the facts OF expert
ence. but which, after all. would suffer
no harm if little of its birthright OF
respect were paid it: 3Be good, and
you'll be happy
Fallen into disrepute, there is not
small novelist or poetaster who does
not find it easy to make his dramatic
point by showing forth just the con-
trary. "Be good, and you'll be hap
pyrs the scoffers contemptuously re-
peat; it is complete nonsense, they tell
us. See yonder good man bowed down
with incurable disease, they say; yon-
der good woman with unbearable dis
grace; wonder faultless child with inher-
tied misery-every one of them good,
every one of them wretched. Where
in this world shall you find happiness
as the simple reward of virtue, so much
price paid down for SO much commo-
dity? This good man trudges in the
sun and dust; the man who wronged
him of his estate rolls by in the luxuri-
Gus coach. This good woman is turned
upon cold world with her lover $
contempt; the woman who wronged
her of her good name reigns in her
stead. This young child lies helpless
with the inherited scrofulous faint.
Yet the scoffers ought to know, in
spite of such facts, that the man
who rolls along in that luxurious
coach feels the sword of Damocles
hanging over him; the woman
who stole the lover sees just such
another thief in every shadow; and if
the ancestor enjoyed his riotous living,
the rest of the quotation tells us that
they were of those
| "Wherewith the children of Despair
Lull the lone heart and Danish care"
| And were this insufficient to show the
fallacy Of disputing the time-honored
dictum, happiness could belong to none
of these people for still other reasons.
The woman who stole the lover must
lose him again herself, because the tur-
pitude of her own nature would betray
her. She could not retain him; she is
her own evil fate. The man who stole
fortune can enjoy it only with the
respect and admiration of others, and
that it is impossible he should receive.
In real truth, none of these people.
despite their apparent pleasures and
successes, can be happy, for the one
unanswerable reason that the nature
of vice is as remote from the nature of
| happiness as the north pole is from the
south, the negative from the positive.
wherever there is human being there
is greater or smaller degree of devel-
oped or undeveloped conscience. Sc
| long as that conscience is alive, happi-
ness cannot be had while that con-
science suffers; when that conscience
is dead, all the finer faculties and senses
that produce happiness are dead with it.
Happiness is something more than a
fleeing sensation. 1t has permanence
and solidarity it is almost state of
being. But there is not single pleas
ure of vice that is not temporary, fleet
ing, evanescent, and bringing its own
penalty. Virtue, indeed, necessarily
and from the very nature of things,
supplies satisfaction that is almost
equivalent to happiness, and that must
be felt, let outside grievances be what
they may. How, then, can happiness
spring from the very opposite ? Virtue,
Mrs. Jameson says, is the habitual
sense Of right, and the habitual cour-
age to act up to that sense of right,
combined with benevolent sympathies,
the charity that thinketh no evil. This
union of the highest conscience and the
highest sympathy fulfills my notion of
virtue. Strength is essential to it
weakness incompatible with it. Where
virtue is, the noblest faculties and the
softest feelings are predominant the
whole being is in that state of harmony
which | call happiness. Pain may
reach it, passion may disturb it, but
there is always a glimpse of blue sky
above cur head. As we ascend in Dig
nifty OF being we ascend in happiness,
which is, in my sense of the word, the
feeling which connects us with the in
finite and with God. And vice is
necessarily misery for that fuctua-
ton of principle, that diseased craving
for excitement, that weakness out Of
which springs falsehood, that suspi-
cion of others, that discord of ourselves,
with the absence of the benevolent pro-
pensities constitute misery as a
state of being And the same writer
further continues II have had argu-
ments, if it be not presumption to call
them SO, with Carlyle on this point. It
appeared to me that he COMPOUNDED
happiness with pleasure, with self
indulgence. He set aside, with a tow
ering scorn, the idea of living for the
sake of happiness, SO called he styled
this philosophy of happiness the phi
losophy of the frying-pan.' But this
was like the reasoning Of a child whose
idea of happiness is plenty of sugar
plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensa-
ton, is, as the world goes; something
to thank God for. and pain is pain,
great evil which l do not like either
to inflict or suffer. But happiness lies
beyond either pain or pleasure ; is as
sublime a thing as virtue itself, in
dlvlslDle from it !; and under this point
of view it seems perilous mistake to
separate them.'
After all, then, the trouble with most
of these scoffers at our old saying, who
do not believe that happiness follows
virtue any more than vice, is that they
confound pleasure and happiness; pleas
ure, which may be utterly material and
animal, an affair of the senses; hap
piness, which is also an affair of the
soul, and may answer to the salts
faction of the powers of the whole ma
ture. He who is good thus can hardly
fail of being happy; he may not have
money, but he has what money cannot
buy; he may stand on no pinnacle of
success, but he mounts the prouder
heights of conscious neighborhood to
God; he may have all the losses that
i'll luck and untoward fate can bring
him-friends, fortune, family; being
good he retains friend in himself and
an everlasting Friend above him; his
possessions are those that neither moth
nor rust can corrupt; his dead are like
anchors thrown over into the deep
water Of the river Of life; he sits down
at the hearth OF the great mother, and
all mankind are his brothers, and he
is happy. Discomforts, deprivations.
troubles, are inconsequentiaf things to
him who holds the secret of real COM
tent and happiness. In this instance
they are passing; in that, they are COM
pensated for; in another they belong
to region Of which the person whom
they attack hardly takes notice. The
early Christians, thrown to the lions
and devoured BY flames, were wrapped
from III the sufierings Of sense Ii
garment Of happiness as imperishable
q IRE itself. But it is not to the ecsta-
sizes Of religion alone that such happi-
meas is combined, for it Is the property