HAPPINESS FROM OBEDIENCE TO PHYSICAL AS WELL AS SPIRITUAL LAWS.

 

As happiness springs from the full and perfect expression of the laws of our being, and as such expression is in accord with the plan of nature, it follows that happiness is the natural estate and misery or pain the unnatural. Talk of the saving power of pain! Pain has no saving power. Happiness is not built on misery. People talk as though they expected a reward for suffering. Why, the very suffering shows a wrong, which, if righted, changes pain to joy. Yet they count their pains, disappointments, and measure their tears as treasures laid up in heaven, which are good at sight with heavy interest for answering joy. A man may be a victim of chronic sickness for a score of years and daily racked with physical torture, is it not his loss? How can he be repaid? Crowd his after years with all the heart may desire, and this loss cannot be made good; for life should be replete with its just demands fully met, and its cup cannot overflow. Why should he be rewarded for a sin against the laws of health? When we walk in accord with the laws of our being, the very fulfillment of these requirements brings delight. We are athirst, and with what exquisite delight we drink the crystal water! We hunger, and how delicious the plainest food! We desire to breathe, and what joy to inflate fully the lungs with pure air! Health is next to heaven, and with it we are in unison with the material world. The beat of its pulse vibrates through our being, chord responding to chord. Thus have we felt when on some lofty mountain top, the world at our feet, the blue sky overhead, fading and melting into the distant mountain ridges, the crisp air like wine, and to the beauties everywhere around us our being responding. Then, life was a song of joy, and to exist the supreme delight.

 

But how shall we keep ourselves in accord with the spiritual, for man faces two worlds, and is amenable to the laws of both. As such, he must conform his life so that it will accord with both these states. He must understand that obedience to the laws of physical health is as obligatory and as much a part of religion as obedience to moral laws. Perfect health is a primary element of moral excellence.

 

Hence, it is that men, laboring under the mistaken theory which left the physical life out of its scheme, have fallen into grievous blunders. A jaundiced theology was the offspring of a jaundiced preacher. Gall in the blood embittered the mind, and bred intolerance and hate. There was a gospel these teachers knew not of, the gospel of health. The teachers of the world have taught that happiness was not to be sought in this life, which at best is a vale of tears, and only came as a reflection from the perfect peace which comes from abject contentment with the decrees of fate, after assurance of having gained a passport of the future. We are assured that the world was not created nor is sustained by any such artificial or arbitrary plan; and abjectness and contentment, growing out of dwarfishness, are not in nature's creed.