Christ brings us into the living alliance with forces and personalities that are spiritual, and thus makes us strong to resist all animal temptations and those impulses toward greed and wrong which, if indulged, drain our life of its manly felicities.  He would have us lift our manly cups to God, and make their rims to touch the heavens.  Christ would have us to live for other’s welfare and to know the joy of duty and of sacrifice.  It is the man who is living for wife, and child, and neighbor, who has flung himself with all his might into the carrying forward of some great cause that blesses his fellow-men, who knows the true and increasing joy of the manly life.  The happiest woman in the world is the mother who is living for her child.  It is in working out the salvation of other people that we find the true joy of our own.  It is this joy that carries the martyr through his fiery tasks with a song and a shout.  To be able at the end of our days to look up to God and say, “I have finished the work thou gavest me to do,” is to have the best wine at the last of our feast.  We must have joy; it is indispensable.  It makes us healthy and strong and enables us to be of some use in the world.  It is so necessary to our best becoming and doing that we must put away everything that increases it.  We must have the joy of truth and virtue, of duty and sacrifice, of hope and love, which is the joy of the eternal life.  Christ thus holds out to us a joy that lasts, and one that satisfies forever.

Jesus was no cynic, no ascetic, and no fanatic.  He loved the great outward world, and was the friend of all men.  He was hated only by the Pharisees, if to these He spoke sharply, His words to the children were sweet as a mother’s, and in His words about the birds and the flowers you hear the tones of a lover.  He loved the lakes of sweet Galilee, her hills, her fields and her olive groves; and among them often took His disciples apart to rest awhile.  Adopt Christ’s views of God; of the future; Christianize your opinions, your character and your conduct, and you will have manly joy even in the midst of sorrow.  Christ lived much in communion with God.  He lived much out of doors, in the fields and among trees, the birds and the flowers.

We must come back to nature.  Happy the man who owns a piece of ground in the country and lives on it betimes, where he can hear the robins singing their hymns and the winds chanting their litanies; where he can see the sun rise and feel the hush of the hills; where the spirit that is in the beautiful world can touch and bless him as it did the blessed Christ.

Brothers, I wish you great joy.  Live in the constant sense of the Heavenly Father’s loving presence, and of nature’s veracity and friendly intention.  Distrust all doctrines, all opinions and all ways of living that destroy manly joyousness.  Never lose sight of the fact that a noble life is a truthful life.  Truth is a trust.  He who has discovered any portion of useful truth has something in trust for mankind.  God is the author of truth, and when man seeks this imperial virtue and acquires it, he is in possession of great power.