It is plainly God’s intention, as in nature and in history, that our human life should grow better and more joyous as it advances, and that the best shall not be at the first, but shall wait until we are ready for it.  The highest and largest blessings can come to men only when the men are fitted to hold and to use them.  If you are going to give a man a purse or a diamond you can thrust it into his hand in his youth, or on the street, even when he is asleep; but if you would give to him a great truth or virtue, if you would make him a noble character, you must wait upon the man’s growth, and be content if after many years you see only a flash of what you would give him appearing.  Step by step, through all the gradations, we travel, and if faithful to truth, Christ will make in us a perfect manhood, and of us a perfect society.  His gift is so great, vital and complex, that He can not bestow it all in the beginning.  He would make our life an increasingly joyous life, and give us the best of its wine at the last of its feast.  Christ would have us always increasingly hopeful and joyous, and never of sad countenance.  All our faculties were designed to minister to our joy.  All the great world of life below is a happy world.  The children of the air and the water are all baptized into joy.  Even the solitary creatures that carry their narrow houses with them have their joys, which are well known to their intimate acquaintances.  So in the world of adult man we find the joy of life disproportionate to condition and faculty.  In the faces of the men we meet on the streets we see many scars and dark lines of storm and care; only seldom do the faces we meet there wear the rainbow.  Men are without joy because they have violated the laws of nature, they have subordinated their manly powers, reason and conscience to their animal instincts; they have lived by wrong theories and wrong methods, and for unmanly ends, and thus have exhausted the joy of life’s banquet.

A man can have deep and continuous joy only if his life is continuously rational and progressively manly.  He must put away childish things and live for truth and right, for love and immortal virtue.  If our hearts sadden as our years increase and our thoughts widen, it is because there has been a defect in our vision and a sophistry in the logic of our conduct.  If the growing corn comes only to the blade and to the ear, and not to the full golden corn in the ear, we may be sure it is because there has been something wrong in our gardening.  Christ comes into our wasting life to give us a new, a higher and a better joy; to give us new truth, new faith, new arguments, new motives, new impulses and new joys.  Christ gives us the Heavenly Father, and thus lifts us into the dignity and beatitude of a divine nature, relationship and destiny.  Man is a child of the skies, and can not find rest complete and joy abiding in anything less or lower.  Bearing now the image of the earthly, we must go on to bear the image of the heavenly.  To have our manly joy ever increasing we must keep the heavenly in sight and take our way from it.