The Happiness

of

Faith

Rev. Daniel A. Lord, S. J.





The Happiness of Faith

by

Rev. Daniel A. Lord, S. J., National Organizer of the Sodalit}^

of Qur.Lady, and Editor of The Queen’s Work,

St. Louis, Missouri.

«

Nine addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, sponsored by

the National Council of Catholic Men with the co-opera-
tion of the National Broadcasting Company and

its associated stations.

(On Sundays from April 8 to May 6 and frotm

June 3 to June 24, 1934)

I. Happiness for an Unhappy World.

II. Is Religion Gloomy?

JII. Pleasure or Happiness, Which?

IV. The Happiness of a Mind that Knows.

V. The Happiness of a Sinless Heart.

VI. The Happiness of a Father in Heaven.

VII. The Happiness of Christ’s Companionship.

VIII. The Joy in a Heavenly Mother.

IX. The Happiness that Death Cannot Destroy.

Second Edition, 10,000

National Council of Catholic Men, Sponor of the Catholic

Hour, 1312 Massachusetts Avenue, N. W.,

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor
Huntington, Indiana



IMPRIMATUR:

Hh JOHN FRANCIS NOLL*, D. D.,

Bishop of Fort Wayne.



HAPPINESS FOR AN UNHAPPY WORLD

Address delivered on April 8, 1934.

The greatest and most consuming hunger in

the heart of man is, of course, the hunger for

happiness.

Infinitely varied as are its manifestations, the

hunger itself is man’s most universal experience.

The quiet student, hidden away among his beloved

books within a sound-proof library; the trium-

phant hero, riding down the Broadways of the

world under a shower of flowers and ticker tape;

the collector, avariciously gloating over a bit of

Ming pottery; the explorer, stumbling fever-rid-

den and exhausted, upon the banks of that un-

known river rolling lazily through tropical jun-

gles; the ambitious woman, plotting to thrust her

name into the social register; the scientist, sud-

denly seeing the success of an experiment that

proves his theory; the business man, studying that

balance sheet upon which is written the record of

his first million; the disinterested lover of man-

kind, tearing down the rotten tenements to replace

them with decent homes for decent families; the
‘

artist as his canvas begins to glow with a beauty

he has sought during long years to capture; the

general, as he watches the lines of the enemy sway

into disorder; the athlete, straining every nerve in

a last victorious burst of strength; the sinner,

hotly panting after some new and illusive lust;

the saint, feeling the nearness of the Eucharistic

Christ—all, all mankind in its noblest and queer-
est moments, in its limitless activities and its most

secret seclusions, its blackest vices and its richest

heroisms, is driven on by that relentless hunger

for happiness.



4 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

God never gave the human heart a hunger that

He did not mean to satisfy. The simple hunger

for food He satisfies in uncounted ways. The

orchards bending under their rich and fragrant

fruits
;
the fields in green and golden harvest

;
the

herds wandering peacefully upon the hillside; the

fish in endless variety -in the sea
;
the roots that

succulently rest within the rich loam
;

man’s

astonishing resourcefulness in shaping God’s

gracious larder into tempting combinations—are
merely God’s way of satisfying man’s basic hunger

of body. While He gave to each beast one or two

or a scant half dozen objects for his appetite, He

gave to His sons and daughters food in variety of

form and color, fragrance and flavor.

In the heart of man is a hunger for the love

and companionship of his fellows. God gave that

hunger; God satisfies it in extraordinary variety.

There is the passing moment of casual acquaint-

anceship as one catches, in the person met but once

and never seen again, a flash of responsive wisdom

or the quick glow of a sympathetic understanding.

Life’s paths are graciously filled with this. There

is the warm and reassuring friendship that binds,
man to a man in comradeship of strength and the
pooling of resources. Women find in other women
a frequent depth of understanding and tenderness

that eases the loneliness of a woman’s heart. Chil-

dren play together in easy friendship. Youth

grows stronger in the company of youth. And the
deep love of a man and woman for each other is
not only the foundation of that sweet partnership

in home and children but the inspiration of the
world’s fairest poetry and much of its most as-
piring ambition. Again, God Who gave the appe-



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 6

tite for human friendships and loves gave its

multiplied fulfilment.

The mind hungers for truth, and there is, de-

spite the Pilates of every age, truth to satisfy it.

The hungry eye quests for beauty, and beauty is

everywhere. When the throat grows parched and

thirsting, God pours out His inexhaustible water-

falls and springs and the red blood of His vine-

yards.

If, then, these appetites and hungers are so

completely and adequately satisfied, need man de-

spair of finding God’s satisfaction for that great

human hunger for happiness? On the contrary,

it must be there, wherever God has placed it. It

must be satisfied by the objects that God has des-

tined for that purpose. Naturally one does not

quench a burning throat with dried grass; hunger

is not satisfied with wool or pebbles; the hunger

of the mind is not content with lies, nor the ques-

ting eye satisfied with ugliness. The search for

happiness cannot be successful except where God

has placed happiness. And (for our great con-
solation) God has placed that happiness within

the reach of all.

In all history, it has seldom been more impor-

tant than now that men and women persuade

themselves of the possibility and divine certainty

of happiness. We need not be reminded that we
are emerging less from the winter of the year into

its brightly promising spring, than that we are

passing from the shadows of one of the most des-

pairful periods of experience into what we hope

is the beginning of happier days.

That was a desperate period through which



6 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

men passed. The things in which they trusted

for their happiness and the things on which they

rested for their peace toppled, crumpled, fell into

disillusioning ruins. The golden calf melted like

so much rancid lard. The stock-ticker no longer

sang its hymn of rising fortunes and of margins

triumphant. Wise high priests of finance and

prophets of business suddenly croaked dismally

of disaster. And the men of literature and science

who had promised us, with the final knifing of

Christianity, a new heaven on a new earth, who

had hated the creed of the “pale Galilean” and

gone mad in their joy over the reborn pagan gods,

plunged themselves and their gaping followers

into a hopelessness that became the most char-

acteristic note of our modern books. Despair of

God, despair of souls, despair of the State, de-

spair of big business and small, despair of mar-

riage and love, and a great inclusive despair of

man himself, was the theme song sung in endless

minor keys everywhere and by everyone who could

catch the public eye or ear. What an orgy of

pessimism and hopelessness it was!

From all that we are mercifully emerging.

Yes! But we must remember that man’s despair

of happiness was not born in the days of depres-

sion but was spawned in the very heyday of our

reckless boom. In the sunshine of our age of gold,

writers sat in their corners shuddering and afraid.

They remembered the war that had almost gutted

civilization, and they shook foreboding heads over

a war to come. In the midst of national wealth

and easy luxury, the current theory of life was

that most hopeless of all hopeless philosophies:

Eat. drink, and make merry; seize the moment;



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 7

gather your roses while you may ; for tomorrow,

horrible thought, we die.

We die! The voices that uttered that phrase

—

the voice of the financier clinging to his wealth;

the voice of the lustful, holding a little tighter to

his perishable lust; the artist as he saw beauty

fade beneath his eye; the lover of mankind who,

when all his work was done, found men still sel-

fish and hard and unhappy—all sang together in
the days of our modern Tower of Babel, the song

of death. For nothing that came to us in our days

of high stocks and low living, of our laughters

and cheap ideals, of worshipful machines and a

neglected God, of selfishness run amuck and the

hungry failures crushed under triumphant wheels,

nothing could escape that gaunt hand of death

sweeping all things into an open grave.'

The collapse from which we are slowly and

painfully emerging did not breed unhappiness. It

simply stilled the noise of our factories and

silenced our clamorous shouts of victory; it cut

down the vehemence of our jazz bands and mini-

mized our loud-mouthed boasting; it hushed the

clacking tongue of the stock ticker and struck

men into terrified silence; and in the ensuing calm

that was not a calm of peace but of terror, we-

could hear sounds hitherto overwhelmed. We
could hear the cries of unhappy mankind hungry

in the midst of plenty. Women and children no
longer wept unnoticed as they told what the lusts

of selfish men had done to them. Prophets cry-

ing out against the buccaneers of finance were sur-

prisingly shrill and clear. And the despairing

voices of modern literature, the voices of its most.



8 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

pagan pagans, Dreiser and Lewis, Shaw and

O’Neill, D’Annunzio and Joyce, The American

Mercury and the hopeless philosophers in our uni-

versities, rang out in an old alarm. The gods in

whom we had trusted we suddenly knew we never

had really trusted. And the goddesses compound-

ed of frail flesh and unhappy vice turned ugly be-

fore our eyes, ugly as we had always known that

beneath their silks and jewels they were ugly, and

revolting.

The collapse made vocal man’s unhappiness.

It did not create it.

Yet the whole idea of unhappiness is sense-

less. The God Who gave us hungry hearts must
have meant to satisfy them. Man is no Tantalus

tortured by a pagan god with water that con-

stantly eludes his parched lips. God gave us this

appetite for happiness and God means to satisfy

it—perfectly in eternity; surprisingly and ade-
quately even in this present life.

Why, the silly little heroine of your latest

stupid novel, echoing without understanding the

heroes and heroines of Ibsen and Shaw, when she

’Cries her apparently rebel cry : “I must find happi-

ness; I have a right to happiness!”, is only speak-

ing out of the great hungry heart of all mankind.

iShe has that right. She should find happiness.

‘Of course the stupid, shadowy, hot, and dangerous

'iPathway down which she trips in her quest will no

more lead her to happiness than will the path of

atheism down which Russia drives its millions nor

the path of lust into which a hundred motion pic-

tures beckon the young. But she is right when

she cries for that happiness which is her due. She



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 9

can find it, if she follows the path clearly marked

by a God made man for love of man’s happiness.

So for the Sundays to come, we are talking

happiness, you and I. I am talking as a member

of that Church which recognizes not merely the

inherent human hunger for happiness but ack-

nowledges that hunger and proclaims God’s eager-

ness to satisfy it. Strange among the many strange

paradoxes of Christianity is the fact that the very

Church which preaches penance sings the world’s

most joyous Alleluias. While it frankly calls the

earth a “vale of tears,” it offers the only philo-

sophy of living in that vale of tears -that is human-

ly satisfactory, divinely joyous. The very clear-

ness with which it faces the facts of sin and

disease, failure and death, makes it see the only

solutions for those problems. It offers the sinner

the happiness of repentance; it brings to the side

of the sick, the comforting Presence of the Divine

Physician; it gives the failure the certainty of a

success that depends upon none of the silly acci-

dents of birth or opportunity that make for

wealth, power, or artistic achievement, but which

depends upon God’s desire for man’s eternal suc-

cess and the grace-strengthened power of his will.

And to the dying (.perhaps even more importantly

for human happiness, to those who love the dying)

it brings the ennobling certainty that the swallow-

ing grave only swallows the worthless trifles with

which men clutter their lives and is, for those who

have believed in God, the gateway swinging into

His Divine Presence.

The Catholic Church today is the most joyous,

hopeful, optimistic organization in the world, be-

lieving in man because it believes in the God Who



10 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

fathered him; and giving to man that reassuring
hope that, strangely enough, was born in a happi-

ness following the world’s greatest sorrow.

For the joy of the Catholic is founded on the

sorrow of His God. His happiness is a thing that

came into the world in the lightning and thunder

and quaking earth that shook the cross of a dying

Savior. At the moment of His death. Incarnate

God bought back for men their lost right to happi-

ness. In the agony of God, man was assured of

his own joy. The blood shed by divinity won the

forgiveness needed by crime-laden humanity. God

died in torture that happiness might flood the

earth.

Glancing swiftly from the Cross, the Catholic

sees all this verifled. The lurid red of Good Fri-

day is transmuted with hardly perceptible break

into the glorious pinks and scarlets of Easter’s

dawn. The broken body of God made man rises in

a triumph of happiness that shall know no end.

The horror of death is swallowed up in victory,

and in the happiness of the risen Christ the Cath-

olic reads the happiness that in measure will one

day be his own.

For if the sadness and pain of Holy Week

lasted scarcely three brief days, the happiness of

Easter is forever. If for a moment those who hated

goodness and happiness seemed to crush both un-

der their blows, goodness and happiness came

flooding back with the returning Soul of the risen

Savior.

And if the Church takes its members down into

the forty days of penitential Lent, it lifts them up

to long months of happiness in the certain faith

and convincing hope of a God triumphant over the



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 11

very things that make for man’s unhappiness, sin

and death.

Ours is a happy faith, my friends, and for the
coming Sundays we shall study that happiness

which is ours for the asking. We shall find it
down pathways marked often with the bloody feet

of a Savior treading the Way of the Cross. But
ahead of us now as throughout our life is the

happy glow of Easter.



12 THE HAPPINES.S OF FAITH

IS RELIGION GLOOMY?

Address delivered on April 15, 1934.

Is religion gloomy? Is religion correctly sym-

bolized by that long-faced, joyless, grim-manner-

ed creature of caricature, in his frayed black frock

coat, his tall unbrushed hat, his hand raised in

endless prohibitions and denials? Is religion some-

thing that stands between a man and the sweet-

ness and joy of life?

So you might think if you believed its enemies,

and its enemies have been as diversified as

the decadent Nero of Roman days and the re-

bellious Voltaire of the Eighteenth Century, as

Swinburne palely sighing for the pleasures of the

flesh, and Nietzsche visioning happiness in that in-

credible monster, the Superman trampling under

the steel hooves of his war charger the bodies of

his prostrate foes.

But a caricature by its very definition is not a

picture. It is a deliberate distortion. And one

does not go to enemies for a true and accurate

likeness. Too many of those who call religion

gloomy have learned that word not from those

men who have found in religion the deepest peace

and most lasting happiness, but from those like

Nero who saw rising Christianity coming between

him and his bestial desires, or like Voltaire who

thought religion an infamous thing because it

asked of him a little loyalty to God and country,

to truth and the claims of friends.

It is true that there have been religions that

seemed to hate the happiness of a human heart,

as Puritanism did when it served God scowling.



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 13

branding laughter as a sin and simple joys as evil,

and pulling out with gauntletted fist even the in-

nocent Maypole of Catholic days. Manichaeism

called all the beautiful things of the world the

handicraft of the evil spirit; yet the Manichees

called themselves followers of the Christ Who

loved every flower upon the hillside and sought for

the love light in human eyes. When within its fold

the Catholic Church faced Jansenism and found it

making a creed of despair and a cult of gentle

melancholy, it branded its followers as heretics

untrue to the loving and joy-bringing Savior.

No wonder that Puritanism died of sheer ugli-

ness as Jansenism died of lovelessness. No won-

der too that the churches, which began in the six-

teenth century to affect an ugly ritual in plain,

whitewashed meeting houses, where dreary pro-

hibitions were more important even than an al-

most hopeless creed of depraved and corrupt wills,

powerless against evil, and of souls predestined

despite their efforts to eternal misery, have bit by

bit readopted the beautiful service and the divine

optimism of the Church from which they separ-

ated.

When I answer the question, Is religion

gloomy?, I am answering for the Catholic Church

which serves God smiling. I speak for a Church

of deep happiness and spontaneous joy. It is fill-

ed, that Church, with the light of burning tapers

and the voices of great choirs echoing in human

fashion the endless music of heaven; its sweet-

smelling incense, beloved even by the non-Cath-

olic novelist, rises in clouds through the most ma-

jestic buildings ever reared by man, to be shot

through with the glorious colors of stained glass



14 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

and to mellow the too brilliant gold of Fra Angel-

ica’s pictured saints and the smiling faces of Rap-

hael’s Madonnas. Its priests go up to flower-cov-

ered altars, more beautiful than the poetic shrines

of pagan Greece, clad in the world’s most graceful

garments, and serve God in the stately dance that

is the Catholic ritual, with song upon their lips

and deep joy in their hearts.

All this external joy which fills each service of

the Church is merely the symbol of that joy that

is in the heart of every Catholic who understands

his faith and has tasted its endless flowing springs

of peace and happiness.

Happily for the world, the Catholic religion

also has its stern prohibitions. It stands with its

laws between men and a host of ugly things. Hap-

pily for the world—for the things from which its
laws hold back mankind are the very things that

poison man’s joy and rob him of his real happi-

ness. These are the things which Christ forbade,

not because He was a stern, repellent lawgiver,

but precisely because He was the divine Lover of

mankind. Cruelty was all about Him
;
He forbade

it though the tyrant and the powerful hated Him

Who got between them and those they had op-
pressed. Lust had ruined homes, crushed the

hearts of women to the casual passion of men,

made marriage almost the chance mating of the

beasts, and deprived children of dignity and

sweetness and innocence. He was stern in His de-

nunciation of the impure, though the impure

thought Him a fool, as Herod did, scourged Him
to ribbons, as the bestial soldiers did, and chafed

resentfully under the restraints of His pure eyes.

When anyone can show that murder and theft.



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 15

cruelty and selfishness, the dull monotonous

rounds of passion, oppression of the weak, - and

contempt for the helpless, have brought or can

bring any happiness to the human race, that man

can find human joy skulking in the footsteps of

the animal, then and only then dare it be said that

the stern prohibitions of religion make men un-

happy.

The Church has stood, as Christ has stood, un-

falteringly between man and the things. that would

ruin his joy. It forbids him the unrestrained exer-

cise of his passions for which so much of stupid

modern literature clamors, not because the pas-

sions may not be turned to highest purposes, even

consecrated in the joy of a Sacrament; but because

it knows that their unrestrained exercise robs man

of his dignity, and flings him from his high estate

down the scale of life to the jungle and the pigsty.

The buccaneering swaggering of robber barons

and the ruthlessness of many modern business

men, the Church forbids as it forbids all injustice

and exploitation of the weak
;
not because it would

cramp the just ambitions of a noble soul but be-

cause it would hold back cruelty and oppression

from the helpless.

Had the Church done nothing for the happiness

of the world except hold in check man's baser ap-

petites
; if it had merely forbidden the chains of

slavery and the tighter chains of passion, held

back the tyrant from his oppression, and restrain-

ed the cruel and selfish from the exercise of their

strength, its part would have been a tremendous

one. The very men who clamor for freedom from
the restraining influence of religion are living to-

day in a civilization made safe and a little gentle



16 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

and considerate and pure because, or rather if,

men are accepting that restraint.

Yet you or I would find the Church uninter-

esting if its contribution to happiness were merely

one of don’ts and mustn’ts. We need more for
happiness than protection from evil. We need a
philosophy of life that brings confidence to our

minds and assurance to our hearts. And, finding

that philosophy, we need the courage and strength

to carry it into operation.

Both these in astonishingly complete fashion

come to the man who understands his Catholic

faith.

Out of my recent reading, one phrase rose like

a slap in the face. “This muddle called life,”

wrote the author—and in a single ugly expression
crystalized all too much of our modern unreligious

attitude. One need know little of modern litera-

ture to be aware of the grim fact that to hosts of

serious men and to millions of the frivolous, life

is an exasperating muddle. The chorus of modern

thinkers sing neither in tune nor do they keep to

a semblance of melody. Thoughts clash hopeless-

ly with thoughts. Philosophies give philosophies

the lie. What life means, whence it comes, whither

it goes, the simplest answers to the simplest ques-

tions: all these things stump the thinker without

religion and leave him in a state that is thick and

dark with fog.

And when, like some Greek dreamer out of the

heroic past, a thinker hits upon a heroic course

for life and maps it out for his followers, he knows

that no power of his can give them the strength to

walk his difficult way; he has no power to lift

them up to heights of heroism.



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 17

Life today is a muddle because thinking is so

muddled. Life today sinks too often into selfish-

ness and cruelty, because men seeing the better,

lack the strength to accept the difficult things de-

manded of one who embraces a philosophy of dis-

interestedness and self-sacrifice.

How can a man be happy whose mind is mud-

dled? How can he find joy when a sense of his

own weakness turns his high resolutions to jelly

and holds back his steps from the paths his mind

sees and approves? How could a captain on the

bridge of his ship be at peace with the world if he

knew little of the port from which he came, noth-

ing of the port to which he must drive his ship,

and felt he had no stars or sun by which to chart

his course, no instruments on which he could rely

with certainty?

A man without religion today stands like a
puzzled child before a thousand merchants of

truth, each clamoring his wares with an emphasis

that untrustworthy merchants reserve for doubt-

ful values. Worse, like the captain of a drifting

ship, he cannot find anyone to tell him whence he

came, whither he goes, or what sun or stars he can

trust for his guidance.

Against this muddle, the Church offers a calm

and satisfying explanation of all the essentials of

life, a beautiful synthesis of truth that fills the

mind with a deep content. No longer is the man

of faith puzzled by a thousand vendors of truth,

each far surer that his rival’s truth is worthless

than that his own is good. Above him, as he stands

on the bridge of that Bark that is Peter’s, he sees

the magnificent fixed stars, the dogmas of faith,

radiant, beautiful, provable, true, and by them he



18 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

guides a sure course from harbor to final port. The

man of faith is not a man of muddled and unhappy

mind, but one who has seen truth as a gracious and

comprehensive whole, and by it shaped the great

essentials of his life.

All this we shall see more clearly as our course

progresses.

Nothing so tears the soul of man as the con-

flict between his high aspirations and ideals and

the downward drag of his weaknesses and sins.

Racked between a clear-seeing mind and a weak

will, he suffers that awful agony of indecision and

thwarting characteristic of our noblest heroes and

heroines in modern unreligious drama and litera-

ture. His hands reach for the stars. The quick-

sands suck his feet down into ruin. He has a philo-

sophy of life, perhaps; but that philosophy fails

to give him the strength he needs for its execution.

And his heart is crushed and disillusioned.

Not so the heart of the Catholic who has found

in his Church not merely the happiness of a truth

that satisfies but the glorious strength he needs to

carry that philosophy into life. From birth to

death, the strength of Christ, entrusted to the

Church in its Sacraments, flows about in him in

steady currents. He finds that he is in clearest

truth, the branch of that Divine Vine, Jesus Christ,

and that the strength of the Savior flows through

his soul in warm, rich, reassuring floods of sustain-

ing grace. He knows himself not a dislodged and

isolated unit at the mercy of his own sweeping

passions and the chance battering of forces of evil

from without; he feels himself united with the

unconquerable Savior, strong vdth His strength,

as were the martyrs who died bravely for the truth



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 19

they held, or the confessors and virgins who lived

yet more bravely in the face of hot traitorous

temptation from within and the soft arms and

inviting laughter or the frightening mockery from

without.

He is happy because he moves along his course

sustained by the strength that is divine, brought

to him at the hands of that Church whose one con-

cern is that He grow continually in union with

Jesus Christ, the center and source of all strength

and grace.

Is religion gloomy? Yes, to the man who

clings passionately to some hot lust he cannot tear

from his arms. Yes, to the man who prefers his

own all-too-often tricked brain to the voice of di-

vine authority. Yes, to the rebel who kicks at any

law, whether it be God’s or man’s. Yes, it is gloomy

to one who persistently stands outside the Church,

viewing its rugged walls growing strong and im-

pregnable out of the very rock of its foundation.

It is gloomy to the man who, bogged and fogged

in the uncertainties of his own mind, refuses to

believe that there is certainty of mind or assurance

of truth anywhere. Pilate may have thought the

truth-bearing Christ gloomy as He stood before

him and spoke of certainties. And religion may

be gloomy to that man who has never felt the

strength of its Sacraments coursing through his

soul and known that of a sudden he need rely.no

longer on his own weak powers but on the sustain-

ing strength that came from a God made man.

But is religion gloomy to us who know it? It
is an unending joy. It is bright with the glowing

beauty of the ritual. It is peaceful with the strong,

protecting walls of its laws and Christ-given com-



20 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

mandments. It is joyous with strong certitudes

and magnificent doctrines groined together into

the stately arches of truth. It is happy with that

strength which, supplementing our own, carries us

to heights we dare not attempt unaided and which

will, please God, eventually carry us to that only

life which makes this life intelligible, the life of

intimate and face-to-face union with Him, seen

and known and loved, with Whom religion unites
us first in life.

Religion, far from being gloomy, is shot

through with the smile of the Lover of Mankind

and the sweet, provisioned happiness of God the

Rewarder

!



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 21

PLEASURE OR HAPPINESS, WHICH?

Address delivered on April 22, 1934.

Christ promised His followers happiness. He

foretold it as heaped up, pressed down, flowing

over. He guaranteed them a hundred-fold of hap-

piness, even in this life. He prayed a divine prayer

that their joy might be fllled. He loved His dear

ones with too deep a love to give them as their

legacy other than happiness.

So, where the Old Law was shot through with

the woe and pain that would fall in heavy blows

upon those who broke the commandments, Christ

prefaced His new commandments with the glhd

word, “Blessed”. “Blessed are they”. He cried

joyously, “who hear the word of God, and keep it.”

And each of His great Beatitudes is a guarantee of

happiness for those who follow their difficult way.

And when the battle of Calvary had been fought

and won, Christ gave to those faithful who had

tasted its apparent defeat a new cry of victory.

“Peace be to you,” He said, and they smiled back

in new joy. For peace is the lovely word that the

mind of man had wedded in close bonds to the other

word “happiness.” “Peace and Happiness”, is a

jointure of words dearest of all to man’s hungry

heart.
I

Christ promised His followers happiness.

What He never promised them was pleasure.

Nor could He, nor His Church, stoop to so unworthy

a bribe. For pleasure is to happiness what gaudy

paste diamonds are to a Kohinoor; what nerve-

shattering jazz is to Beethoven and Wagner; what

the excitement of hoofbeats thundering down the



22 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

track is to the joy of great literature; what the

giggle of a half drunk man is to the strong, vibrant

laughter of a great and contented man.

Yet the promise of pleasure as a substitute for

happiness is precisely the bid made for the human

heart by the world that hates Christ and distrusts

faith. “We cannot, it is true,” cries the frivolous

world of easy living and quick profits, of fiattering

men and pliant women, “give you happiness. But

we can give you a better thing : Frivolity and gaiety,

the swift return of pleasure. We can give you
dancing feet and eyes that glitter, the feel of gold

in your pocket and soft lips upon your cheek. We
can give you gay jests and easy laughter. We can
give you pleasure.”

Indeed, this age of ours has made of pleasure a

profession and a trade. It has enlisted much of wit

and beauty and smartness, much of society and

business, in a great combination whose commodity

is pleasure, brought within the reach of all, and

suited to the purse of the richest and the poorest.

Merchants peddle it at so much the celluloid foot

of film. They hawk it in the dusk, unhealthy atmos-

phere of night clubs. They sell their books by

blazing across the jacket a gay promise of two hours

of vicarious sinning, the thrill of watching a crim-

inal about his crime, the excitement of watching

with hot eyes a sweet adultery in all its fascinating

glitter, with a careful glossing over of its furtive

uneasiness and its sick awakening. Pleasure is for

sale in the clicking ball whirling toward a winning

number; in the rhythm of feet marking time set

them by the beat of a primitive tomtom
; in laughter

responding hysterically to an evil jest; in luxury

that wraps warm the body in soft comforts of furs



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 23

and fine fabrics, of exquisite foods and languorous

beds ; wraps warm the body and leaves the soul cold

to chattering.

We of a shrewd age that disdains cheap substi-

tutes and pounds the counter as we demand the gen-

uine, have been taken in most shamelessly by pleas-

ure, the cheap counterfeit of happiness, the worth-

less substitute for Christ’s own joy. We have

bought pleasure from merchants whose own eyes

were burned out with weariness of the pleasure

they have sold us. We have taken pleasure from
the twitchy hands of those whose lives cried out in

newspaper headlines and divorce proceedings, their

failure to find other than disillusionment in the

valueless thing they offer us.

Sd if it is pleasure you seek, the Church cannot

give you that. Nor can Christ, the Author of the

Beatitudes. If your eyes are focussed oh that de-

ception known as “a good time”, religion is not

your approach. True, the Lover of simple things,

Christ Jesus, blessed the simple, sweet pleasures

of life; He loved the dear delights of home and the

happy associations of friendship; He sat at table

in the close intimacy of meals shared with happy

companions; He stood under the open sky and felt

His heart respond to the glory of a golden sunset

foretelling a clear day to come, or the waving lilies

of the fields that were like the trustful children of

His heavenly Father. But the giddy pleasures of

His time and ours. He could not and would not offer.

Two young men stood before the fascinating

Christ. To both He issued a soul-stirring and im-

pelling invitation: “Come, follow me.”

The first was rich. He had tasted pleasure and let

it grip him as only pleasure can. So he turned away



24 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

sorrowing and moved back to the pleasures of his

laden table and his luxurious home, to the fair

things of eye and ear and sense that made life so

sweet and comfortable—and dreary. He left the
side of the poor Christ to buy himself a life of com-

fort and pleasure, and became for all time the sym-

bol of the man who, clinging to the pleasures that

wealth can buy, throws away his supreme happiness.

The other, a poor fisher lad, was young enough

to feel his senses drawn to the beauty of fair women

and the excitement of the open sea. Pleasure issued

its piercing call to the young John, yet he turned

from it to the Christ Who had not where to lay His

head and Who tasted hunger, labor, discouragement,

and apparent failure. He followed a rejected

Savior through His career of mounting disappoint-

ments and stood beneath a cross of defeat- Then he,

John, became an outcast of his people, a hunted fug-

itive from Roman swords,, knowing none of the sweet

delicacies of life, and ending in the exile of Patmos.

Yet had he at any moment in his life seen piled

before his eyes all the pleasures with which luxur-

ious Rome and comfort-loving Israel could have filled

his days and cushioned his nights, he would have

laughed his endlessly boyish laughter and pushed

them aside in disdain. He had found in the com-

pany of the poor Christ that happiness that flames

out in the white heat of the Fourth Gospel, that

leaps in the soaring love of the Epistles, and that

rises to ecstasy as Heaven itself is opened in the

revelation to John the Divine.

One young man found pleasure and with it,
sickening oblivion. The other found happiness in

the joy no man could take from him.

Sometimes it is puzzling how pleasure can ever



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 25

trick US with any semblance of happiness. For,

despite their surface likeness, they bear no essential

resemblance. They are utterly unlike. Pleasure

is of the eye and ear, the quickly stirred and swiftly

dying senses. It is vibration of nerves to sudden

stimulation. It is as surface a thing as the rippling

of waves under a casual breeze. Happiness is of

the heart and in the heart. It is as deep as the soul

and as imperishable. It rests securely at the very

core of a man’s being and stirs to glad awakening

not those senses which he shares with the animals

but that spiritual soul which is like a spark of

divinity.

Pleasure depends upon the things which are out-

side a man: the gold and treasures he can finger

with greedy hand
;
the beauty that can be eyed with

restless craving; the power that is built into fragile,

crumbling monuments; the lying love that withers

in a night
;
the laughter of a chance friend too easily

changing to sneers. And because it depends on

things outside a man, a thousand accidents can

sweep it away. After a brief illness it is gone. A
tricky turn of fortune’s wheel, and the means of

buying it have been swept away. Old age sees it

melt beyond recovery. Its mere repetition first

dulls its charm, then wears it down to drab routine,

and finally gives to it that bitterness that poisons al-

most beyond endurance a “life of pleasure.”

There is no more restless, dreary, unhappy man

in the world than a man of pleasure. His eyes are

sick. His mouth is hard and unsmiling. He moves

with a restlessness that drives him on, less in any

hope of joy that may lie ahead than in dread of the

boredom and weariness that lie behind. And

where on all this unhappy earth are there to be



26 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

found such drab and ugly women as those who in

terrible irony have been called women of pleasure

or daughters of joy?

But happiness is that deep and true and reas-

suring gift of God. It is a quality that passes de-

scription, but that is recognized with a quick leap

of the heart and a firm knowledge that it is beyond

the attack of any thief. I can give it away. But

no man can take it from me. Sickness cannot touch

it. The loss of wealth leaves it still. Complete fail-

ure cannot strike the smile from the lips of a happy

man.

I have seen happiness in the eyes of a paralytic,

motionless on a bed of pain. Happiness has greeted

me in the smile of the poor. Happiness has crowned

with deep content the silvered head of age. Since

pleasure can be bought, any thief can steal it.

Happiness cannot be bought, so it gaily defies all

the thieves of the world, from the petty pickpocket,

his fingers clasping my purse, to that thief of all

thieves, death itself.

Happiness walks unexpected ways. It has

learned the lesson of happiness that Christ taught

in His Beatitudes when He promised joy in the very

things that seem most remote from pleasure
:
pover-

ty of heart, purity of soul, meekness and persecu-

tion. Happiness stands with the mother at the

side of her baby’s crib. It enters with the priest

into the quiet of the sanctuary. It welcomes with

open arms the martyr in whom happiness mounts

with the flames of his physical torture. It writes

its signature across the ledger of the business man

who has set honor and honesty before easy success.

It wakes the laughter of the little novice who, in

her convent, has turned gaily from youth and beau-



THE HAPPINESS OP FAITH 27

ty and the pleading voice of pleasure. It bubbles

ceaselessly in the heart of the saint.

This distinction between happiness and pleasure

is most important. Faith could not and has not

built the Broadways of earth. It builds lovely

homes and quiet churches
;
it establishes honest bus-

inesses and places of clean and sweet amusement.

It is more interested in peace than in excitement.

The silent approval of God seems far more precious

than the rattling applause of men. Faith cannot

give you pleasure; but it can give you happiness;

and though your heart grow weary to nausea with

pleasure, it can never drink deeply enough at the

fountains of happiness-

Shall we see in two people just how deeply that

difference lies?

One was a man, brilliant, fascinating, charming,

clever. He walked the easy ways of sin and found

pleasure his for the taking. About him, his charm

and cleverness drew the witty and the smart. When

he was with the group, wine flowed freely, conver-

sation sparkled, and arm in arm he and his fellows

walked first in the delights of high controversy and

then into the theaters and taverns where pleasure

waited with vine leaves in its hair and golden brace-

lets upon its fair, white arms. And in the purple

darkness of the night, he hurried back to the waiting

arms of his lovely mistress.

And Augustine, the man about town, the brilliant

wit and practiced lover, turned from it all, disgust-

ed, disillusioned, sated, and revolted, to find in the

truth that was Catholic and the morality that was

Christ’s a happiness of heart and peace of soul he

had not dreamed were possible. At last his hungry



28 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

heart rested when it rested in the happiness of faith

and purity-

There was in the days of Christ a woman

charming beyond words. Men looked on her and

loved her gladly. They dropped at her feet their

jewels, their books, their best achievements, their

willing hearts. And she wore their gifts as the

proper ornaments for her beauty. We have seen
with something like admiration the glittering wo-

man of pleasure who was Mary of Magdala.

Then across her pathway came a new sort of

Man. He looked upon her and, far from watching

her with desire or admiration. He pitied her from

His heart. He pitied her for her easy loves and the

jewels she wore so beautifully. He pitied her for

the fair face that had been her ruin and the ruin of

men. He pitied her most of all for her life of pleas-

ure. Mary of Magdala, daughter of joy, threw

away jewels and soft garments, the hearts and

homage of men, her ceaseless rounds of pleasure, to

fling herself in tears at the feet of the pitying

Savior. And in her floods of tears, for the first time

her hungry heart that had been glutted with pleas-

ure, found happiness.

If you, my friends, are to follow Christ’s way of
happiness, you must stand not with Augustine the

rake but with Augustine the saint. You must see

with the eyes of Magdalen that there is no happiness

in pleasure
;
there is only happiness in penitence that

brings back the joyful love of Jesus Christ.



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 29

THE HAPPINESS OF A MIND
THAT KNOWS

Address delivered on April 29, 1934.

The sanest and happiest minds in the world

are the minds that have found faith.

Faith is not the blind acceptance of absurdi-

ties. It is not “rationalized superstition.” Faith

is not a stupid bending of the head to things one

would like to think true. Faith is basically com-

mon sense, the realization that there are things

one can learn from others, and that there are

some things one can learn no other way. It is the

honest facing of the unescapable fact that beyond

the knowledge a man can gain through the brief

exploring of his limited mind, there is a wider

knowledge that explains the data he has assem-

bled. It is the proud conviction that God could

not and has not turned men adrift to struggle for

truth. If when He made the world. He gave to it

a great purpose. He could not be cruel enough to

hide that purpose from men. His supreme crea-

tures. Faith is God’s communication to His be-

loved children of the reason for their existence

and the goal of their journeying. Divinely through

faith, God reenforces the feeble struggles of man’s

groping mind.

Faith is the confession that, if man needs . a

teacher to guide him through the labyrinthine

ways of a visible world, he surely needs a teacher

who can speak with authority of the more impor-

tant things that lie beyond the reach of sense:

the whence and why and whither of life, and in

just how far the God Who made us, guides our

stumbling feet and upholds our vacillating wills.



30 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

Faith sits us at the feet of a divine Teacher in

Whose mind is truth, in Whose heart is love, in

Whose words is power.

Never, perhaps in all human history, have men

known so much and been sure of so little. They

have combed the world for facts and then fought

like children about what they might mean. From

earth’s strata, scientists have pulled astonishing

revelations of the history of our globe. They have

pried into the atom and found there a universe in

miniature, and flung their telescopes across the

sky to see it beyond the reach of either glass or

imagination or mathematics. Facts that lay buried

in tombs of ancient kings and in the scrawling

tracery in caves and on prehistoric bricks are now

as familiar as the reportings of today’s news-

papers. We have seen disease tracked to its secret
lair, and have followed the microbe in grotesque

wanderings. The beam of light has been split into

its parts
;
the secrets of the frozen poles have been

dragged into light; we know what lies in the un-

plumbed depths of the earth.

Facts have been piled on facts. Data have been

heaped on data. We have proved ourselves the
greatest race of fact Anders that ever wrested

from nature its most closely guarded secrets.

Yet while science gets to know more of mice,

it confesses itself to know less of men. The uni-

verse holds back no secrets from us except the

only secrets that really trouble our minds; and

science cannot tell us whether man is a child of

God or the latest chain in an ironic linking of life

with life; whether life itself is a glorious oppor-

tunity or the elaborate joke played by some cosmic

jester; whether the universe is vacant of meaning



THE HAPPINESS OP FAITH 31

or the regal setting for a world drama of forces

that transcend the stars. It has not pierced the

blackness from which man emerges in brief, un-

finished drama; nor has it flashed its lamps into

the oblivion toward which man hurries with re-

luctant but unhesitating steps.

Yet man is persuaded of his importance and

dignity. The astronomer who counts the stars

refuses to believe himself less important than the

things he names and numbers. If man can slowly

conquer the power of the waterfall and with his

will bend to slavery the savage beast, the destruc-

tive germ, the power of the sun, the unseen forces

of the atom, the restless giant that is electricity,

he cannot persuade himself that he, the apparent

master, is really the slave of his slaves, more per-

ishable than they. He cannot think that the winds

and tides, the lightning whipping across the sky

and the swift, corrupting powers of chemistry, will

one day sing a song of victory over his snuffed and

extinguished self.

Man studies life and cannot believe so beauti-

ful and elaborate a thing is the flash of a light

upon the wall to be ended with “Out, out, brief

candle.” Seeing all about him the incredible skill

of Him Who fashioned the universe at which

science pecks with feeble hammer, and into which

it probes with its surface-scrapings of microscope

and telescope and mathematical formulae, he de-

mands to know if he too is an essential part of this

great plan. Since he sees the hand of a mighty

Providence setting sun and planetary systems

upon their orderly courses and caring for the swal-

low upon a sand cliff, he demands the reassuring



82 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

certainty that he too is in the fatherly heart of a

provident, loving Creator.

Seeing plan everywhere, we demand to know if
our lives too are planned. Knowing the gracious

watchfulness that guides the universe, we are cer-

tain we cannot possibly be adrift, derelicts in a

world of elaborate care and satisfied needs.

For all that, the mere fact-finders of today give

no assurance. To explain their piled-up data, they

give us philosophies black with despair. From

precisely the same set of proved facts they draw

conclusions so contradictory that the thinking

world seems to be shrieking with furious denials

and the blank charge of lies and deception. Only

those have an answer for life’s important ques-

tions who turn their eyes welcomingly to the

Teacher Who pulled together all the data that

ever were or could be discovered into a beautiful

and complete solution of life, the Teacher Who

told us whence we came, whither we go, and how

deeply dear we are to Our Father Who is in
Heaven.

Thank God, the group of thinkers at the feet

of the Divine Teacher grows with the years in-

creasingly large and reassuring.

Yet today it is the voice of the despairful that

is still most insistently clamorous. They shout,

these men without faith, that it is a purposeless

world, or at least that man was flung out into an

orderly world, himself without reason for exist-

ence, without purpose in life, without any objec-

tive except that oblivion into which he one day

will be dumped with all the best things of his own

devising. Wherever thinkers and fact-finders with-

out faith are gathered together, whether in the



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 33

grouping of a conference or between the covers of

a single book, they offer the hungry mind of man
that awful poison of despair : “Nothing made you

but a mocking chance^’; “Eat out your heart crav-

ing for happiness; there is none to be found”;

“You are of the animals, with no more will than

theirs and no more dignity or destiny than

theirs”; “What a ghastly joke is this thing called

life.”

God pity an unhappy generation that has fed

its minds with a philosophy of despair.

Among the second group, contradiction and
denial hold high carnival. They leave us puzzled

because they themselves are puzzled. The same

set of facts leads them to a thousand contradic-

tions. Man is an animal—man is the only god;
there are no spiritual souls—there is no God

—

there is only God
;
we are slaves to forces that be-

got us—our wills are the one supreme power in
the universe. They protest, these thinkers, not

merely too much, but to too many things. Beyond

all else, however, they protest without words the

need of a Teacher Who can speak truth with an

authority more than human.

Certainly men have never more clearly shown

the need of that Divine Teacher than when they

went away from Him, scampering off in quest of

truth like so many befuddled knights, searching

for a Grail they hardly believed to exist.

With happy eyes we turn to that third group,

the thinkers with faith. The facts of science are

as precious to them as to any man that lives. But

they know that the facts in themselves are not

enough. The Being Who created this mighty jig-

saw puzzle that is the universe, had and has a plan



34 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

that unites all the pieces into a single glorious pic-

ture. Though the Creator could and did trace in

the world clear indication of His power and beauty

and that love that brooded tenderly over His crea-

tures, only the Creator Himself could tell us in

full the secrets of His heart: Why He had made
man; what He had destined for man’s goal; what

He was willing to do to aid man in his journey-

ings; the depth of the love that surrounded these

rational creatures. Knowing that His cWldren

would fear the darkness from which life stepped

and into which it slipped, the Creator was certain

to open both curtains and allow a little of that

reassuring light to brighten our pathways and

serve as our beacon in life. Faith knew that a

Heavenly Father would place a candle in the win-

dow of His eternal mansion to shine out in wel-

come to His wandering sons.

And when a man has joined in his mind the

data of science with the integrating pattern that

is faith, he finds himself suddenly possessed of a

happy mind. All that he sees and learns falls

into a glorious unity that explains man to him-

self, recreates the universe into a beautiful stage

set for man’s high adventuring, and makes it pos-

sible for each actor to -write for himself a happy

ending to life’s comedy under the approving eye

of God, man’s applauding father and unfailing

ally.

All this he knows, as he discovers Jesus Christ,

the Divine Teacher, Who, since He was the teach-

er par excellence, dared to call Himself “the way,,

the truth, and the life.”

Poor pagan mankind was floundering when

He came, as pagans are floundering today. They



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 35

were lost in a world that was filled with grave

philosophers and that had adapted nature’s power

to men’s service. And this Divine Teacher

sketched for His followers a way that first He

Himself travelled, away from God to God, from

life through life to unending life, a path that rose

in the great, father-heart of God Who made man

because He loved him as a son. Who shepherded

mankind with all the love of a good shepherd for

his fiock, and Who welcomed him at journey’s
- ending with wide opened arms.

He was the Truth. Men had built their univer-

sities then as now to teach truth, and had used

them to squabble over vague opinions and to cloak

with eloquence their uneasy doubts. And He gave

a truth that made ail lesser truths significant. Out

of a divine vision. He spoke of the Fatherhood of

God and the consequent Brotherhood of Man; He

spoke the truth that man was made for an eternal

destiny compared with which all other gain was

loss. By His truth He raised man from the level

of animals and the abasement of slavery to the

adopted sonship of God and the heritage of His

unending joy.

He was the Life. Life was a cheap and con-

temptible thing in the eyes of the pagans then as

now. The life of the Savior made the life of the

weakest and lowliest grow dignified. And to that

merely natural life. He added a share of the di-

vine life, a close union of God with man that gave

mankind new strength and heroism and the cer-

tainty of some day knowing* and loving Divinity

Itself.

How feebly in these few seconds can we

glimpse that magnificent synthesis of life whereby



36 THE HAPPINESS OP FAITH

Christ clothed all men with dignity, gave to the

least factors' of the universe a significance and

high purpose, and welded together in a single

world the Creator and the creatures He had made.

There never was another teacher like Christ

Jesus. And those who today sit at His feet find
%

all of life aglow with meaning, and their own

minds bursting with the light that floods them.

And Christ, the Teacher, turned to His Church

and cried : “Going therefore teach ye all nations

. . . He that heareth you, heareth me.” With that

one command. He made sure that the minds of

men need flounder no longer. They could find cer-

tainty and security and the answer to those prob-

lems which, unanswered, drive men to despair or

madness.

Without faith, the mind is at sea on all that

really concerns it. And happiness does not lie in

hopeless struggle or purposeless drifting. Think-

ers without faith have proved themselves musi-

cians playing a thousand discordant melodies on

instruments out of tune.

For our happiness, since the happiness of the

mind is in truth and certainty, we needed a Divine

Teacher. He was given us.

Faith does not cramp the mind; it opens to it

another world needed to explain this present one.

It does not limit thought
;
it cuts it free from fogs

and mists and the stifling bonds of uncertainty

and insecurity and sets it ranging among truths

that could but vaguely, if at all, be known did God

not reveal them. Faith does not take us from the

company of the learned
;

it brings us into the so-

ciety of Jesus Christ to Whom in time come all
the learned of the world.



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 37

Faith explains the unexplained facts of science.

Faith kills uncertainty about the issues that really

disturb the mind of man. Faith lifts the mind to

that happy state in which it shares knowledge with

one omniscient God Himself.



38 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

THE HAPPINESS OF A SINLESS HEART

Address delivered on May 6, 1934.

The Story of the Prodigal Son is, even more

than the story of Cinderella, the most universal

story in the world. It traces, as only a divine

story-teller could, the strong urge that drew a

young soul, first, in resentment against restraint

and a dislike of all law into rebellion, then toward

the fascinating flame of sin, until finally after he

had dragged himself through the mud of the pig-

sty, he staggered back to repentance, to his for-

giving father, to happiness restored.

The story is the universal record of sinful man-

kind. No, it is far more personal than that. It is

the individual record of every man or woman who

has given up the happiness of a sinless heart for

the exhausting, disillusioning slavery of sin and

who has finally found happiness only in the arms

of God.

Whatever disagreements may exist between

thinkers with faith and thinkers without faith,

they are surprisingly in accord on the story of the

Prodigal Son. The one element alone which the

man with faith can add is the joyful return to a

forgiving Father. But you will notice that I say

“thinkers.” We have had a lot of smart-aleck
sneers at sin and its consequences. Our modern

writers who think with their nerve centers and

have convictions rooted in their emotional com-

plexes, have followed Oscar Wilde into a panegyric

of sin. Glitter fascinates them. Glamor they find

irresistible. And they think that by tricking out

sin in fair words and lovely garments, by parading

it through penthouse romances of week-ends on



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 39

country estates, by presenting sin as brave or

clever or beautiful or necessary, they can make

men forget how ugly it is and how completely it

slays human happiness.

But thinkers know. Writers whose works are

more enduring than banana flies are deeply con-

scious, Christian and pagan alike, of the horrible

misery that follows in the pathway of sin. The

Greek dramatists wrote their greatest plays on

how the guilty conscience tortures the sinner and

how in the end his sins tear him to pieces. Shakes-

peare gave us his tragedies of sin, as Ibsen showed

us the sins of forebears, the crimes of injustice,

selflshness, lust, egotism, ruining lives. George

Eliot did not keep herself unspotted from this

world, and neither did George Sand
;

yet both

wrote eloquently of the unhappiness of the sinner.

The story of the unhappiness brought to the

world through sin is written into every popular

detective story with its criminal writhing in a flnal

chapter of justice vindicated. Sin strews the pop-

ular novels quite as much as the newspaper records

with ruined lives and blasted careers, with heroines

fluttering in futile fashion from sin to sin, and

with heroes who wreck innocent lives. Sin writes

its record in gangland headlines that scream less

of single murders or deeds of corruption and vio-

lence, than of the sordidness, the guilty con-

sciences, the shifting eyes and back street ugliness,

the complete wretchedness of sin’s fatherland, the

underworld.

One need not prove the unhappiness caused by

sin. One need only look into the history of every

nation or of every family. Compared to sin, noth-

ing else seems to bring mankind unhappiness. Sin



40 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

is at the bottom of all human misery. Ask any

historian who they are who have steeped the world

in blood and tears, and he will point out to you,

even though he could not define the word sin, those

selfish men of power who plunged nations into

war, those hotblooded beauties sacrificing a coun-

try to caprice or wounded vanity, those villains of

history, whether they were giants like Napoleon or

monsters like Caligula or fair courtesans like

DuBarry, whose sins wrote unspeakable pages into

the record of our race.

And into the story of your own family has been

written sorrows I need not repeat for you : Broken

hearts and homes, the rifts between relatives, the

nagging of bitter tongues, the squabbles over

money or inheritances, women growing old before

their time, men turning away in disillusionment

from the trickery of trusted ones, old people and

little children scourged by the selfishness of their

own. If there is unhappiness within a nation or

unhappiness within a family, blame that unhappi-

ness on sin!

Yet who today is raising any voice against this

welter of unhappiness bred by sin and sired by

selfishness except the Catholic Church? Modern

literature is largely a conspiracy to defend and

spread sin. Modern motion pictures and drama

present the sinner as gay and charming and fasci-

nating. Much of modern philosophy calls sin

necessary or brave, urging youth to sin by talk of

biological necessity, or while not free to avoid

wrong, befogging the difference between good and

evil, praising the rebel who defies the laws and sins

bravely.

Against them all the Catholic Church, lover of



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 41

mankind, cries, “Along the road of sin, now as in

the easily read past, men have rushed from un-

happiness to misery. There are only torn con-

sciences and blasted lives along that pathway of

vice. You cannot find me one sinner who has

escaped the shadow of his sin. You cannot show

me one man or woman of evil life whose days were

not bitter with unshed tears or cynical laughter.”

Even if Christ had not died under the blows of

the sinner. His Church would fight sin because it

is a degradation of man’s nature, an inhuman,

anti-social thing. It would hate sin simply because

sin, however much it may pander to man’s plea-

sure, hates man’s true happiness.

How can sin make a man other than unhappy
when it twists his faculties from their highest pur-

poses? The hands of a man, made to build and lift

and construct, become through sin hands that soil

and despoil and tear down. The tongue of a sin-

ner, destined for truth and friendliness, for lulla-

bies and hymns and serenades and songs of coun-

try, becomes a poignard to rip a reputation or stab

to death an innocent soul. Wine that might warm

the heart, in the cup of the sinner only strips him

of reason and self-control and power of will. And

the sinner takes his high creative power of love and

uses it as the animals do, in purposeless, ruthless,

passionate selfishness.

Sin makes man unhappy because it is anti-

social, as selfishness always is, or greed or tyranny

or cruelty or lust. Sin is the very thing that makes

a man less a man and a woman less a woman. Even

if God had not by high command forbidden it, the

Church must of necessity stand between man and

the things which beyond all else rob him of his joy.



42 THE HAPPINESS OP FAITH

/
/

Pity the sinner, driven on by his unresisted

temptations, and finding each sin a little sourer, a

little staler, a more futile effort to fill a gnawing

hunger with the husks the swine disdained. Pity

still more those whose lives are spoiled and ruined

by the relentless selfishness that makes a sinner

madly eager to drag all others to his own degraded

level. Never more truly does misery love com-

pany than in the case of the sinner unsatisfied to

sin alone; unhappy when he cannot claw a fellow-

victim to his own rotten standards of life.

But the man and woman of sinless heart? How

deep is their peace! How sure is their happiness!

“Blessed,” cried the Savior, “are the clean of

heart.” Blessed in the fact that they know some

day they shall see God. Blessed because they walk

earth’s ways with sure feet and high courage.

No restless torturing of conscience makes mis-

erable their day or fills their nights with Banquos

that will not down. No remorse of soul forces

itself upon them with resistless insistence, recall-

ing innocence betrayed, youth misled, fortunes

won at the price of God’s poor, and partnerships

in evil.

Or if the now sinless man and woman see evil

in their past, it is evil that no longer taunts and

tortures. They stand now with Mary Magdalen,

who, though she had trained red robes of passion,

yet, forgiven, saw Christ smiling at her in a gar-

den. They take their place with Peter who, though

he thrice denied his Lord by the blackest lie that

struck the captured Christ, yet was given the triple

chance to swear he loved his Savior.

Sin lets loose, as all men have known, those

elements of a man that tear him to pieces. His



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 43

emotions slip from their restraining rein. Self-

control is wrecked. The sinner finds himself no

longer master of himself but blown to and fro by

every slight puff of temptation, clutched at by the

hot hands of sin, and deflected from the paths of

peace and decency by every glancing eye or every

gleam of easy gold.

The sinless man is master of his own house,

ruler of his soul. He has learned the brave lesson

of self-control that makes him brush aside the hot-

breathed temptation and walk without harm

amongst the enemies who are God’s and his own.

He is brave and sure and certain of himself.

For sinlessnesg is not a negative thing, a fear-

some avoidance of evil that one is not brave enough

to seize in eager arms. Sinlessness is the bravest

thing in the world. Through it a man stands firm

beneath the standard of the Cross when treason

would be easy. He fights for principle and for

right when yielding would be sweet. Sinlessness

holds a man with that brave company on Calvary’s

embattled ridge, when Judas had sold out his Mas-

ter, and Peter and the disciples had turned coward-

ly backs, and the hot surges of lust and cynical

unbelief of Herod and Pilate had risen in massed

formation to overwhelm Christ and His followers.

Sinlessness is as brave and positive and aggres-

sive a thing as yielding to temptation is weak and

cowardly and easy and supine. And believe me,

there is no happiness in weakness, cowardice, and

the easy treason of a weakling.

What nonsense these moderns talk who laugh

at the sinless man and the pure woman as weak

and contemptible. Sinlessness is to the soul what

health is to the body, a product of exercise and



44 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

nourishment, of vigilant care and sane living.

Health and happiness, they go together in soul and

body. The sinful soul is the weak, unhealthy soul.

And happiness is for the strong.

“Blessed are the clean of heart!” How right

the Savior was. While the sinner moves restlessly

from lust to lust, his appetite for pleasure and

wealth, for honor and distinction, for new excite-

ments and less boresome adventuring, sends him

careering unsteadily and discontentedly through

life, the sinless lifts to God the happy face of a

Francis of Assisi, sings to God the ceaseless songs

of a Cecelia. While the notable sinners of the

world have been the notably miserable, unhappy

men and women—as Nero was when he screamed
for the releasing sword of a slave, or those later

Louises of France when bored to suffocation in the

midst of cultivated vice, or Oscar Wilde, rotten in

prison as later he rotted to death, or DuBarry

shrieking at the foot of the guillotine—the sinless
walked through life and into death, smiling and

unafraid.

Great DeBrebuef, first of American martyrs in

stature and heroism, sang in the joy of his heart

as the Iroquois hacked his body with white hot

tomahawks and garlanded his neck with festoons

of torches. Happy? He had lived with God; he

had worked for souls; there was no remorse for

the past, no fear for the future. And his great

voice that had wakened with song the echoes of

our primitive forests sang amidst the tortures of

martyrdom in the great joy of his soul.

The sinful may find pleasure. But we threw

that aside as unworthy of us. Only the sinless can

find happiness. And it is the Catholic Church that



45

• /
’

THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

makes that happiness easy as it safeguards our

souls from sin. The commands that Christ gave

us and that His Chhrch repeats are only stout ram-

parts against the sin that would steal away our

joy. And, while modern ethicists dream high

dreams of noble souls scaling the heights of good-

ness and see them dropping back hopeless before

these unassailable heights, the Catholic Church

lifts us up to the heroism and happiness that be-

longs to the Saints.

Sinlessness would be too daring a thing to hope

for if we walked alone. The Church brings us into

the companionship of Jesus Christ. Temptations

would be too powerful, if we fought them alone.

The God who dwells within our hearts fights with

us for our virtue. We should be desperately lonely
even in our happiness if we thought we struggled

to fulfill our high ideals, an isolated unit in the

midst of a world insistently bent on sin. The Cath-

olic Church couples us with its martyrs and vir-

gins, its confessors and saints, in the gallant army

of the Church Militant. •

In their company, we may aspire to sinlessness

of heart. We may be sure of happiness of soul.



46 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

THE HAPPINESS OF A FATHER IN
HEAVEN

Address delivered on June 3, 1934.

It is hard to remember what the world was like

before Christ, lifting His eyes in perfect trust,

cried and bade us cit, “Our Father Who art in
Heaven.” Or rather, it would be hard, but for the

fact that we live in a generation that has largely

determined to dispense with that Father Whom
Christ asked us to know and love and trust.

Yet, whatever the moderns may do against God

the Father, when Christ invited the weary and dis-

illusioned world of His day to lift eyes and hearts

and trusting hands to a Heavenly Father, He

opened a great new era in the happiness of man-

kind. The heavens were no longer brass. They

were the home of One "Who loved the sons and

daughters of His creating with a tenderness that

was infinite in mercy and generosity and watchful

providence.

Obedient to Christ’s 'command (or rather His

sweet invitation), the eyes of mankind swung up-

wards from Olympus with its discredited gods who

were only men’s own virtues and vices raised to

gigantic scale. The ugly gods of pagandom, Osiris

and Moloch and the deified devils of Asia and

Africa, grew uglier than ever before the picture of

a benign Father Who noted the fall of a sparrow

and yearned over His children with an eternal

love. Valhalla seemed a place of rough boister-

ousness and petty squabblings when the nations

heard of the many mansions in their Father’s

house.

Even the beautiful page that was the Jewish



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 47

religion was definitely closed. God could never

again be merely the judge, the avenger, the Jahveh

of wrath and vengeance, now that the hand of

Christ had pushed aside the curtains of Heaven to

show us a God Who preferred to welcome one

prodigal rather than to judge the nations; to have

mercy upon the lost sheep rather than to lift His

rod to strike the guilty; a God Who confessed in

divine humility that His mercy was above all His

works.

When Jesus Christ gave us God the Father, no

other concept of God could ever fully satisfy and

make happy the human soul.

Man must have a god. History has proved

that. The future will endlessly add its chain of

proofs. The world, filled as it is with wonders,

is empty without God. Or more correctly, without

Him the world becomes annoying and exasperat-

ing, futile and purposeless, as is a painting with-

out a painter, a house empty of either builder or

owner, a great organ with no one to shape its pipes

or touch to harmony its keys.

So when man did not know the true God, he in-

vented a thousand gods to fill this empty space

that is the universe and comfort the loneliness that

cried aloud for the solace of God’s presence and

power. He needed, you note, a thousand gods to

do inadequately what our Father does perfectly.

And man was happiest when he was serving his

god, even a false one. He danced most gaily about

the altar of Pan. He knelt in exultation before the

beautiful statue of thundering Jove. He moved in

lighter step behind the sacred bull that symbolized

his deity. He found a deep satisfaction when he



48 THE HAPPINESS OP FAITH

sacrificed to his god the best and finest of his pos-

sessions

Yet when Christ came, men were utterly weary

of the gods they had invented. Moloch was too

cruel. Jove was too cynical. Pan was a little silly.

The grim and ugly gods and goddesses of the East

were so terrifying and revolting that it was neces-

sary to house them in caverns and • hedge them

round with mysteries.

And about all the gods, big or little, was a

futility that made their worshippers turn away

not knowing whether they could not help or did

not care to if they could. In all the gods that man

had made to his own image and likeness, he found

he had put too much of his own cynical selfish-

ness. Even the Jews worshipped Jehovah tremb-

ling, with much of lip and little of heart, much of

dignified ceremonial and little of gladness. They

stood in awe. They hardly dared to love.

And then the voice of Christ rang out, “Our

Father!” And God at the words became infinitely

loving and lovable.

A father? How simple that all seemed and
how simple it made the whole of life. God had

made the world not out of caprice or necessity, but

because He wanted sons and daughters bearing His

image and likeness. All the beautiful things, all

the limitless unselfishness that crammed earth and

sun and stars, were the lavish provision that the

Father had made for this. His human family. All

humanity stood revealed in a single brotherhood,

severed to outward appearance, perhaps, by color

or language or custom or land, but brothers none-

the-less in the great generation of their Father.

In God, if He was our Father, there was not



fHE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 4ft

merely power, but power actuated by love; not

merely might, but might tempered with mercy;

not merely providence, but providence that could

and would respond to the appeal of prayer.

No wonder, then, that the first Christians sang

aloud in their joy. They were happy with a joy

that laughed at privations or martyrdom, ostra-

cism from family and class and country, the

stigma of cynical ridicule and the oppression of

political spoliation. What did these trifles mat-

ter? The great God was their Father. They walked

through life straight into His welcoming arms.

They moved through all life’s problems and diffi-

culties sure that He watched their every step. He

was proud as a father of their courage and suc-

cess; He was quick as a father to understand and

forgive their moments of weakness and sin.

With that one phrase, Christ bound together

Heaven and earth into a common family. Earth

was the happy road along which one travelled to

his Father’s house. And one had only to lift his

voice, and his Father heard his request for bread

or forgiveness, for protection or for stength.

Beside this God Who is first of all a father,
all other gods have seemed ugly distortions, blun-

dering tyrants, or futile gluttons. And in the

happy conviction of this Father in Heaven with

power to move His arm and love to sway His heart,

the Christian world moved forward in supremest

happiness.

Until our own strange age.

If ours is an unhappy generation, it is largely

because it is a generation that has forgotten our

Father Who is in Heaven. Men cannot subsist

without a God. Always they are too inadequate



50 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

and lonely. But they can try. And tried they have,

to their own deep disillusionment.

We have seen atheism grow in most astound-
ing denial of man’s primary instincts. First it

was an atheism that merely found God incon-

venient and felt it would be well rid of Him. It

pushed Him aside because He came bearing His

annoying Ten Commandments. It bade Him mind

His own affairs and leave men to their pride of

mind, their unjustly acquired riches, their power

that cracked its whip in despotism of state or fac-

tory system, their lusts of flesh and longings of

eye. They drove God from them because they pre-

ferred their sins which were less crimes against

individuals than a kind of gigantic violation of

noblesse oblige, a blow at family honor and dig-

nity, an affront to that Father Whose kingdom was

set back by these sons of His Own creation. Men

denied God the Father in practice for the same

reason that rebellious sons have always struck at

the sires who stood between them and their evil

ways.

And then, because God irked them, these

atheists took their second step. They cried aloud

that He did not so much as exist. They banished

the Father from His human family, and left that

family utterly orphaned. They slammed the door

of His heavenly mansion, and suddenly found

themselves homeless and on the outside. They

jeered at God’s watchful protection over His chil-

dren and at His willing answer to the voice of

prayer, and shouted the desolating doctrine that

there was no one in all the world to hear or help

or care or answer.

And atheism, stupid and blundering and fatu-



THE HAPPINESS OP FAITH 51

ous, flying in the face of the endless longing and

uninterrupted history of man’s reaching for God,

plunged its followers into a world that had no

maker, a family that had no father, a life that had

no termination, a destiny in which men were no

longer sons or masters but the slaves of relentless

forces driving them on from nothingness to noth-

ingness.

The fool, said the wise man, hath said in his

heart that there is no God.

Yes, but the miserable and purposeless, the

forsaken and lonely, have said that there is no

Heavenly Father.

But now as always, man must have a god. Need

we give even a quick glance at the fleeing of men

from the cold, brutal misery of atheism? It blos-

somed and died within our one generation, this

blatant attack upon a God Whom, in contradic-

tion, it claimed did not exist. Men could not en-

dure a world empty of God, a Heaven that held

only flaming suns and cold, burnt-out moons, and

unpeopled planets. They could not bear to think

themselves orphaned and alone.

So we have seen our moderns swing back to a

thousand gods, for gods they must have. But they

are gods as ugly and colorless and unsatisfactory

and ruthless as those gods of the days before

Christ pointed out a God Who is our Father. And

in none of their gods have they found the slightest

joy or happiness.

With sweat and blood, with the sacrifice of the

bodies and souls of men and women, we have seen

our fellow Americans serve the great god, success.

Yes, and seen that god fling them back into the

depths of an as-yet unfathomed despair. Men who



52 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

made the old pagan gods like themselves, and

fashioned Jove after their v^isest, Apollo after

their wittiest, Venus after their most beautiful,

again set up their self-idolatry. Humanity is god!

But what a silly god, waking a momentary enthu-

siasm, and then leaving the worshipper disillu-

sioned as he looks upon his own pettiness and

realizes that all humanity is as he.

Grim eyed philosophers have given us a world

soul for god, a vague abstraction as cold and im-

personal as the ether that surrounds us and as un-

beautiful. Men have worshipped the gods heredity

and environment, and known that this worship

was slavery. They have fallen down in adoration,'

as America did half a century ago, as Russia is

doing today, before the turbine and dynamo and

tractor. And those gods devoured their servants

and flung their worshippers into joblessness.

There is no God of happiness save the God to

Whom Christ Jesus lifted our eyes when He cried,
“Our Father.” Our minds reject all other gods.

Our hearts regard them with loathing. But if God

is my Father, then happily I stand on tiptoe

—

God’s noblest work. His son. Then confidently I

lift my hands in appeal, sure that my prayer will

wrest from His willing bounty the things I need

for life’s difficult way. If my first care is for my

Father’s business, I may go down into the apparent

failure of Christ on Calvary; my success is yet

assured. If I see in my fellowmen sons of that

same Father, I cannot know bitterness or hatred or

envy or greed. Nor can I do other than crush

from my heart the evils that would harm those

brothers and sisters who like myself are children

of His dear tenderness.



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 53

And with a great throb of happiness, I remem-

ber that it is a Father in Heaven. Each step I take

becomes a little lighter and a little gayer as I

stride down the road of life toward that mansion

in Heaven where my Father waits for my glad
homecoming.



54 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

THE HAPPINESS OF CHRIST’S
COMPANIONSHIP

Address delivered on June 10, 1934.

There is courage in the heart of the man who

hears a comrade’s footsteps moving in rhythm with

his own. There is confidence and reassurance in the

hand of an unconquerable leader lifted in summons.

There is happiness beyond words in the knowledge

that in the soul of a lover throbs an affection that

folds one close. There is joy in the realization that

I need face neither the perils nor joys of life alone

and lonely.

And faith brings me all these things as it leads

me into the blessed companionship of Jesus Christ,

our Lord.

Happiness in faith? Ah, yes; faith brings with

it the joy of a certain mind and a sinless soul, of a

Father in Heaven and a destiny that lifts man above

the dull, dread fate of the brute. Yet all of these

things seem to fade into secondary importance, or,

rather, they seem to merge into one central core of

happiness, as faith turns upon the glorious figure of

the Savior its bright, white light, and we see Him

moving toward us, the Leader Who inspires us to

highest heroism and unfailing victory, the Comrade

Who walks gladly at our side through every joy or

sorrow that may touch us, the Lover Whose patience

is as tireless as His love is without bound, the one

Fi’iend Who has within Him the power to banish the

loneliness of the human heart.

How can one, into a single short talk, cram even

a little of the happiness that comes to the man or

woman who has placed a confident hand in the hand



I’HE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 55

of the Savior? From that moment he knows with

St. Therese that nothing can affright him, nothing

can dismay him. He cannot for a second feel for-

saken and alone.

Even God the Father, closer to us than the air

we breathe, seems distant and remote when we look

at the incarnate Son of God, leaving the joys of

Heaven, emptying Himself and taking the form of

a slave, to walk the earth as man’s devoted friend

and constant companion. Earth could never again

be wholly dreary nor the human race even close to

despair when into its remotest quarters pierced the

glad certainty or the thrilling rumors that a God-

made-man had come from Heaven to become the

companion and comrade of His creatures, the Leader

in the terrifying fight against man’s ruthless ene-

mies, the Lover Who clothed. His love in the form of

the fairest of the sons of men.

Loneliness, perhaps next to sin itself, had been

the bitterest enemy of joy. Man had grown from

long and bitter experience to know that no human

companion could ever dispel completely that haunt-

ing loneliness. Between each man and his fellows

seemed to rise a high and insurmountable wall, and

though he beat it until his hands, were torn and

bleeding, though he plotted to scale it through

friendship or art or the self-revelation of poetry, at

the end he had not crossed the wall or brought his

friends into the secret garden where his realest

hopes and ambitions and joys bloomed.

Loneliness comes to sour our best joys. Loneli-

ness doubles the pain of our sorrows and the fear of

perils that lurk ahead. Through eyes that are smart-

ing from unshed tears we look upon our closest as-

sociates and see that they have not sensed our grief.



56 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

We hurry to them with our successes, to find them
bored a bit, halfheartedly pleased, vaguely mis-

understanding, or, sadly, flashing the green glint of

jealousy. And we grapple with temptation relying

upon our own weak strength, knowing that it is a

fight in which our nearest comrade stands by, a

spectator.

Just because they found the earth a lonely place,

the old pagans peopled it with superhuman beings

:

friendly little fairies and sympathetic sprites, “good

people” who served men and guarded their interests,

dryads who made the dark woods less terrifying,

and spirits of earth and air who brooded affection-

ately over a man even when he seemed most alone.

Poor, futile substitutes for the God-made-man

who walked into our lonely earth and made us know

that it need no more be lonely.

We had found at last the invincible Leader with
Whom we could face our enemies unafraid. He was
with us in every good fight. His figure moved before

us across life’s battlefield shining like a white flame.

He smiled confidently and encouragingly at us over

His shoulder, reassuring every man who plunged

into the struggle for right and decency and honor,

holding out firm and encouraging hand to every wo-

man who fought bravely for her purity or stood

guard over her ideals and the goodness of those who

clung to her.

Faith gloriously assured every good man and

woman that they fought life’s battles not alone but

always under the leadership of Jesus Christ, strong

God and tender Man, Who guided to victory every

noble cause.Who led to triumph every noble life. Who

captained to certain glory every man or woman who,

before the eyes of the world or in the secret places



'I'HE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 67

of their own souls, fought for justice’s sake the good

fight.

Afraid of life’s pitiless struggle? Not those who

remember that they fight under the glorious cap-

taincy of the unconquerable Christ! Not they who

have accepted the Leadership of Him Who flung

back all the evil forces that ever surged up against

humanity, in the overwhelming victory of Calvary.

Once on a time, men could, with some show of

justice, taunt even a merciful Father in Heaven with

the bitter cry

:

“What do you know of our woes,

You in your well lighted sky?”

But that was before the Son of God had become

the comrade of His beloved sons and daughters and

had, in their company, tasted every human experi-

ence that could come to His companions.

We watch with a surge of joy the historic Christ,
truest friend that ever offered the hand of friend-

ship, closest companion that ever shared a joy or a

sorrow, or laughed happily and wept in deep sym-

pathy with one he loved.

Christ, though He bade His disciples follow Him,

saw to it that they did not follow
;
they walked shoul-

der to shoulder with Him and He with them. Gladly,

because they were His comrades. He tasted their

poverty and the labor of their sweaty hands. He felt

the fears that tempested their timid souls and ex-

perienced the disdain that surrounded the peasant

fishermen of Galilee. He stood at the bedside of the

sick, touched with merciful hands the foulest sores

and ulcers, stroked back to sight the closed eyes, and

to hearing the ears that had been sealed to all sound,

wept with those who wept over the dead, and paused



58 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH*

in uncontrolled grief of soul before the tomb of a

dead friend. Because He had been hungry, He fed

the multitudes by miracle. Because He was terrify-

ingly lonely, He staggered back across the dark gar-

den of His agony, to find His best friends asleep.

Christ became the universal comrade of all man-

kind. He walked in the cool of evening. His arm in

that of the strong young John. He smiled gratefully

for the tender gratitude in the eyes of women. The

bitter lash of denial stung His face as a friend

swore he had never known that captured Man.

Gently He disengaged the arms of His Mother cling-

ing about His neck, as He left her at the call of His

Father’s business. He was the welcome guest at

wedding feasts, and sat with His disciples as upon

the wood-fire fish were broiled and wine heated.

Not with the vision of God but with the piercing

experience of our Brother and our Comrade, Christ

tasted life’s bitternesses and its joys, the awful stab

of failure and the smashing blow of ingratitude, the

cruelty of the powerful, wielding not justice but

spite, the howling of a mob that wanted one thing.

His blood and His death.

It was Christ, not His faithful imitator, St. Paul,

Who could perfectly say that He was all things to

all men.

God had been creator and infinite ruler; He be-

came companion and comrade, walking the ordinary

ways of man’s experience and taking His followers

with Him through all the really difficult things they

might ever meet. He had been remote, in the com-

pany of adoring angels; He became so close, that a

child could seize His hand in perfect confidence, and

a sinner could wipe His feet with her hair.

Why, faith has brought my God closer to me than



THE HAPPINESS OP FAITH 59

my dearest friend of earth. I find Him nearer to me

than my own soul.

Blessed Savior, I adore you as God. I honor and

thank you as Creator. I cling to you as my Savior.

But I clasp your hand in perfect confidence, knowing

that you, in all my difficult or joyous ways, are my

Comrade and my Friend.

And Christ, the Lover? Who can begin to de-

scribe what the love of the Sacred Heart has done in

dispelling the loneliness that beseiged the souls of

men?

We see in Christ a love that was vast enough to
embrace all men that ever lived or could live, yet in-

dividual and personal enough to pour itself out on

a single sinful woman of Samaria or on a thief who

hung in just punishment upon a cross.

The strong, manly love of Christ for men, that

grappled rough fishermen to His service and held

multitudes of peasant folk captive before His charm

and transparent affection! The love that broke

forth in tears over doomed Jerusalem or over Laz-

arus, the friend who had died! The love that went

out to all mankind, burning Him to death upon the

altar of His Cross, yet that tenderly stooped to the

little children by the lakeside, catching them up in

warm embrace ! The love that went out in gratitude

to His Mother, in protection to Magdalen, in tender-

ness toward good women, in pity toward the woman

who had fallen

!

Christ, the perfect Lover .of whom poets had

dreamed in vain. Who united to the eternal love of
God the strong, throbbing love of a father for His

children, a brother for His little brothers and sisters,

a comrade for His dearest associates

!

As Christ walks into the life of a man or woman.



60 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

the hideous, terrifying figure of loneliness is gone

forever. God, I realize, no longer knows my needs
and my ambitions, my fears and my trials, only from

divine vision. He knows what He Himself has tried

and felt. He Himself had been hungry and poor and

rejected; He had quested vainly for love and found

hatred
;
He has trembled to a blood-sweat at the tor-

ture, sin, and death that were pressing in upon Him

;

He went down into the blackness of failure and

death.

My God has become my fellow exile. He has

loved me to the point of sharing my life to its every

last detail. He has grown to know me intimately,

and to love me because I need so much His love and

pity and forgiveness.

And the faith of the Catholic pushes on to new

flights of happiness. Far from leaving me, the his-

toric Christ is as much today as He was in the days

when He summoned His disciples, my Leader, Com-

panion, Lover, Friend.

The endless presence of God in the world, of

Christ among His people, foreshadowed when God

called Himself Emmanuel, God-With-Us, becomes a

glorious reality in the Sacrament of altar, taber-

nacle, and human hearts. Christ is still with me,

still walking my weary and difficult ways, still lift-

ing my head in the joyous knowledge that He has

not left me orphaned, but dwells with me until the

end of time.

With Him, I move through life in utter confi-

dence. I have a. Friend to Whom I can pour out my

inmost heart. I have a Lover Who loves me because

He knows how badly I need His love. I have a Com-

rade Who stands at my side pouring His courage

into my soul, and placing His reassuring hand under



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 61

my elbow. I have a Leader with Whom I move for-
ward to certain victory.

I am not alone. I am never lonely. I have the

beautiful companionship of Jesus Christ, the Son of

God, made man, to be the comrade of me, a man.

I



62 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

THE JOY IN A HEAVENLY MOTHER
Address delivered on June 17, 1934.

Today, mine is an easy subject. For I talk of the

happiness that came to mankind when God gave His

Mother to be Mother of Men.

No one need be told, save in briefest reminder,

of the happiness that good mothers have brought to

the world. We cannot read that complete, lovely
record even in the grateful poetry and music of

every race, in the sweet faces that have been caught

on canvas, or in the eloquence that has leaped most

spontaneously from the lips of orators. The only

perfect record of a mother’s deep unselfishness and

boundless love each man reads in his own life’s his-

tory, and he remembers with reverent gratitude the

happiness that came to him when a mother’s love

cradled his infancy, guarded his youthful ways, for-

gave, as no other love can do, his faults and his in-

adequacies, and followed with approving eye his

manhood’s career.

No page in human history is so beautifully writ-

ten in unselfishness and service, in truest under-

standing and most patient forgiveness, as is the page

written by mothers.

Yet it is sad that a great section of even the be-

lieving world should know nothing of the happiness

that was offered when the dying Savior turned to

John, the representative of humanity, and cried,

“Behold, thy Mother!” The very men and women

who have bowed reverent heads before the miracles

of human mother love, have refused to accept the

happiness that comes when one knows that the

Mother of God is one’s own mother as well. Quick



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 68

as they are to appreciate the vast tenderness and

care of their own mothers, they shy away from the

happiness which the Mother, chosen by God for His

Own beloved Son, could and would bring to these

adopted sons and daughters who are the dear, ran-

somed brothers and sisters of her Boy.
%

We have not the time nor is this the place to

restate the irrefutable proofs that Mary is God’s

Mother. To one who thinks clearly, there is only one

person in Jesus Christ, the person of God Incarnate.

Mary is the Mother of that Person Who was born

of her in time, and that Person is divine. Jesus can-

not be split into two people, a god and a man ; He is

the single Person with two natures, human and di-

vine, and Mary, the mother of the human nature,-is

the mother of the one Person Who is divine.

Nor shall we, who are thinking now of the hap-

piness Mary brings to our lives, go over and authen-

ticate the lovely gift by which Christ gave His

Mother to us in the person of John, our representa-

tive. All we need to remember is the quick eager-

ness with which primitive Christianity and all Chris-

tian religions until the days of Protestantism, clasp-

ed this lovely Mother to grateful hearts. Mary,

Queen of the Apostles, became Mary, Mother of the

Infant Church.

They lived, those first Christians, surrounded by

the evil and stupid and arrogant women who had

beeen lifted by poetic imaginations to the rank of

goddess. They knew the unhappiness that flowed

from the shrines and temples of these unwholesome,

sinful goddesses, who stimulated their worshippers

to new lusts, to a universal contempt for woman-

kind, to a kind of cynical pity for the sex whose very



64 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

goddesses were as passionful as Venus or as cruel

as Minerva.

With special gratitude they caught and kissed

the hand of Mary. All the pale and seductive influ-

ence of the pagan goddesses faded before the sweet-

ness and power of the woman God has chosen for

His Mother.

Nor need we long stress what Mary’s motherhood

has meant to the happiness of humanity as a whole.

That glorious contribution is brilliantly clear to any-

one who sees the burden of pagan motherhood made

the glory of Christian motherhood, as women proud-

ly bore their children in imitation of the Mother of

Nazareth who had borne God, made man. The new

love of purity that inspired young men and women

found much of its inspiration in the fair woman who

became Immaculate Mother, sheltering the un-

touched purity of the Most High, only because she

had first been a stainless virgin. Hats were lifted

and knees were bent to women because they were the

daughters of a heavenly Queen. Women felt toward

themselves a new reverence. How could they do

otherwise? Had not the Eternal God chosen one of

their number as the first tabernacle of His incarnate

Son?

The love for Mary, and men’s reverence for the

Madonna and her Child, found expression in new

pity and tenderness toward children, and a willing-

ness to forgive and help even those sad daughters

of Eve who had lost the exquisite virtues that made

Mary fair before men and, in the sight of God, full

of grace.

All this the Catholic knows in the endlessly re-

peated experience of the Church. The world could

jia^'er again frankly worship sinful women, nor could



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 65

it be completely merciless to little children ; it could

not sneer at good women or thrust back deeper

into her muddy despair the sinful woman, after a'

woman had carried in her body and rocked in her

arms the God of Heaven and earth.

Yet deep in his soul, the Catholic knows he has a

fuller happiness that comes through Mary. God,

again answering a fundamental human craving, has

given to him personally a Mother to watch over him

as not even the most loving mother can, a Mother

who, with sweet and insistent power, pleads his

cause with his elder Brother and her grateful Son.

Mary, like all the gifts of God, belongs to the in-

dividual soul. She is my mother, interested in me

because I am her adopted son who, though I slew her

Son and Savior, am none-the-less entrusted to her

in His dying testament.

Faith and human experience join hands where

Mary is concerned. No one in all the world feels

toward a child the interest felt by a mother. The

interest with which she regards his first stumbling

steps rises in unfailing crescendo as she watches

him stride in triumph through his career or come

staggering back in devastating failure. Then, as

faith assures me that God’s Mother is my Mother

too, I realize with intensest joy that Mary holds me

deep in the concern of her heart.

With a double interest, Mary regards me. My
career is of intimate concern to her Son. My suc-
cesses serve to advance His kingdom. My sins strike

at His crucified body. My failures set back His
cause. My brief heroisms delight His Sacred Heart.
Mary watches my life with an interest that is part

of her mother’s interest in all that promotes or im-

pedes the cause for which her Son lived and died.



66 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

But her interest goes so far beyond that ! When

during her own agony beneath the Cross of her Son,

she mystically accepted the motherhood of human-

ity, I became of deep concern to her because I was

and am her child. Mother-like, her heart beats high

as I triumph. Yearningly, she leans above me as I

fall. With gladness she applauds my little victories.

I may hide my bleeding, battered head and with it,

my failures and sins, in her forgiving, maternal

embrace.

There is no limit to a mother’s goodness except

the limit of her power. What she can do for her

children, she does most eagerly. She stands baffled

and distressed before the things that are beyond her

power. Human mothers feel again and again the

thwarted realization that they lack the power to do

what love demands and unselflshness desires.

Not so my Mother who is God’s Mother as well.

Human like myself she still, through her divine ma-

ternity, reached to power that is not measured by

her own personal greatness but by the infinite grati-

tude of a Divine Son.

A cup of cold water given in His name, Christ
assured His followers, would win for its giver eter-

nal life. The botttle of ointment broken over His

feet by the sinner of Magdala won her a place in the

Passion of Good Friday, the Resurrection of Easter,

the endless story of His Gospel. A dying thief makes
a broken prayer of faith from a cross, and hears the

promise of companionship with Christ in Paradise.

What, then, must be the grateful heart of Christ

toward Mary? Mary, who gave not a cup of water

but the milk of her breast
;
not the momentary wash-

ing of His feet, but the servant-like care of His

infancy and boyhood
;
not a passing act of faith but



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 67

a lifetime of devotion from the moment when she

called herself His little handmaid till the dark after-

noon when she followed Him through His Way of the

Cross to share His agony and death.

Mary, who was His nurse and only human

teacher, His companion and gracious housekeeper,

who made Him the infant garments that swaddled

Him and the seamless robe He wore during His pub-

lic life, Mary who prepared the food upon His table

and sat watching while He slept. Mary whose love

was often the only human affection to gladden His

days among His own to whom He came though they

received Him not.

What could such a Mother ask such a Son and

know refusal? Especially when she asks for those

younger brothers and sisters whom He, dying, com-

mitted to her care?

Confidently, then, the sons and daughters of that

Mother, whose power is limited only by the grati-

tude of God, lift their hands in petition. She has a

mother’s heart to love. She has a mother’s power

to intercede. We know with certain faith that she
will talk to her divine Son for us. We know that that
divine Son, out of gratitude to His Mother, will ans-

wer her requests.

Christ was good when He gave us a Mother for

our happiness. He knew that often we would stand

even before Himself abashed and ashamed. It is

sometimes difficult to realize that a crucified Christ

will hear, us when we beg Him to forgive the sins

that are holding Him upon the cross. But we did not

crucify Mary. We did not slay our Mother. Tear-
fully we turn to her beggging her to ask the pardon

we do not deserve.

Some day Christ will judge us, justly and with



68 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

inexorable regard for right and wrong. How sweet-

ly it accords with God’s mercy that we may bind to

us in pity and love and maternal sympathy the

Mother of our Judge.

And as she shared with her divine Son all the

experiences of human life, she regards with under-

standing born of a common experience the problems

we lay at her feet. Our poverty and weakness, our

failures and exiles, the loss of friends and position,

the thousand trials great and small that crowd our

life, she knows through that life which won for her

the title. Mother of Sorrows. And, knowing sorrow,

she touches our sorrows and turns them into joy.

God Himself knew the importance of good wo-

men to the world when He gave Mary, the Virgin

Mother, to all mankind. He knew the longing of our

hearts for a mother’s understanding, and decreed

that when death took from us the mother who bore

us upon earth, a heavenly Mother would still safe-

guard us with a love and power beyond that of the

mother we had lost.

Happily the Catholic world turns to Mary, and

through her to Christ. The mother lifts her little

babe to the Madonna and feels new joy in her moth-

erhood. The young woman struggling against a

sweet temptation, looks up into the stainless eyes

of this pure Virgin and sets her ideals a little higher

and her courage a little firmer. The young man looks

upon the girl he may some day marry,’ and rever-

ences her for the Mother in whose footsteps she will

beautifully walk. And from the little child learning

his sweet “Hail, Mary,” to the old man who remem-

bers that Joseph died in the arms of his spotless

bride, the whole Catholic world in temptation and

trial, in joy and success, in sorrow and failure, moves



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 69

happily and securely under the outstretched blue of

Mary’s mantle that some men call the sky.

Unhappy that world that has turned from Mary

back to the stupid, lustful, destructive women who

fill earth with tears and disillusionment ! Happy the

world and happy the individual soul that has taken

Mafy as its Mother and its Model

!

A



70 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

THE HAPPINESS THAT DEATH
CANNOT DESTROY

Address delivered on June 24, 1934.

In the center of their banquet tables, the old

Egyptians placed as the chief ornament a grinning

human skull.

Looking upon its empty sockets, its fleshless

jaws, and endlessly sneering mouth, they cried:

“Some day, we shall look like that. So seize the mo-

ment in greedy hands. Death will tear from us our

loves, our gold, all the fair things of palace and

hovel, of abundant Nile and richest wheat field. Be

merry while you may, for life runs on swift feet

toward the open mouth of a swallowing skull.”

And in the oblivion of drink and lust and uncon-

trolled merriment, they tried to forget the horror

of the grave.

Centuries later, into that same Egypt came the

first Christian monks to build their rude cells where

they might love God in peace. And before them on

their rough tables, they placed the same ugly skull.

Looking upon it, they cried : “Some day, our bodies

shall be as that. But when the day comes, and our

skull is stripped of its fair flesh, our souls will stand

triumphant in the presence of God. Nothing will be

lost of the things we love. In God’s eternal man-

sions, we shall find our friends and our beloved; our

minds shall go endlessly questing into infinite truth

;

our hearts shall throb with the revelation of eternal

beauty. And even that grinning skull will be re-

clothed in immortal flesh and reunited in endless

happiness with its soul.”

And, in the midst of their voluntary penance



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 71

and renunciations, they smiled gaily into the face

of God, and dug their own graves that were to be

their gateway to immortal happiness and joy.

There is no questioning the fact that death, for

the man without faith, ruins all. Despite the whist-

ling-in-the-dark attitude of modern pagans, death

has never lost its terror. Always, in Christ’s words,

it is death, the thief. Death flings under its feet and

tramples the roses of love. It stills the laughter and

the song. It takes from the hand of the artist his

brush and chisel, from the scientist his unflnished

experiment, from the scholar his precious books and

manuscripts, from the genius his incompleted

achievement, as it takes from the arms of the mother

her child, from the husband his wife, from the lover

his fair young sweetheart. Friends scuttle away and •

the house grows terrifyingly silent as death enters.

And the man, poised, before the push of death top-

ples him into the cold arms of the grave, peers with

frightened eyes, first at the life he is leaving un-

finished, incompleted, utterly inadequate, and then

into the dismal ugliness that rises black and forebod-

ing before him.

Of course no man has willingly believed that the

grave was the end. What a horrible thought, if all

the beauty and wisdom, the goodness and genius of

history, were really rotting in their decaying monu-

ments! Mankind has been convinced that beyond

the grave was life. But what kind of life? How fair

an exchange for the precious life that is slipping off

like a cape, old but familiarly dear? And the modern

pagan, when he dares face the inescapable fact of

death at all, asks the same pathetic questions.

If only, cries the pagan, one of our fellows could



12 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

come back from the dead! If only he could tell us

what lies beyond the tomb

!

So history shows us men dabbling in necromancy,

the dread science of communication with the dead.

In our own times, the hysteria of spiritism was just

another futile effort to reach the dead and learn from

them the secrets of their life after death. Men can-

not endure the thought that death ends an existence

that clearly has hardly begun. With so much of lov«

in our hearts, must we stop loving? With so little

of wisdom and knowledge in our minds, must we .

stop learning? With our achievements just the silly

scrapings at surfaces permitted in our brief span

of years, must our activity stop? Can’t someone re-

assure us? Must we live on in the unhappiness of

our uncertainty? We must know, or our very hap-
piness makes us more miserable, as in the midst of

our joys we realize that in death we lose all those

precious things that make us happy.

Give us a man who, from experience, can tell us

of life beyond death.

And such a man was given us.

Jesus Christ died. Oh, how competently and

effectively they put Him to death, at the end pierc-

ing His heart to let flow the last drops of blood and

water. They buried Him, and with Him the world’s

happiness, in a sealed tomb. And He broke the in-

escapable chains of death, smashed the prison of the

grave, and walked the earth radiant and glorious, in

the same body and with the same sweet tenderness

toward His friends, and forgiveness toward His be-

trayers, that had marked Him in life, and in His own

person proved to us that all He had preached of

man’s immortality and priceless destiny was divine-

ly true.



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

Then faith, with a glad cry, knew that man was

immortal, and that it lay within his power to pat-

tern that immortality on the glorious, triumphant,

endlessly happy immortality of Jesus Christ Him-

self!

Men would live on, holding still the personality

that makes them individuals, but with the imper-

fections burned away. Men at death would begin to

live the new life for which all else was preparation,

a life of love and knowledge and power and endless

achievement under the smiling approval of a heaven-

ly Father.

At once the life men led on earth became rea-

sonable and purposeful. All the best instincts of the

human mind had insisted that beyond this life was

another life, lived perhaps in the Elysian Fields,

Valhalla, the Isles of the Blest, the Happy Hunting

Ground, Abraham’s Bosom. God had not given these

instincts without a full determination to satisfy

them. For those who lived as men should live, and

who walked in the companionship of Christ, there

was the City of God, Heaven, that Eternal Kingdom

compared with which all kingdoms of earth were

ephemeral and valueless.

Of course life had become reasonable. Men were

placed on earth as on a proving grounds; the brief

business of living was man’s opportunity to prove

to his Father that he deserved a little the eternal

joy prepared for him.

If there were another life, then the unpaid debts,

the unsolved problems, the unfinished business, the

untasted joys, the inadequacies could all be balanced.

Life’s most difficult problems would yet be cleared

as the light of divine wisdom fell upon them. Life’s

most arduous road led upwards toward a Father’s



74 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

mansion. Life’s joys were a faint glimmer of the

endless happiness prepared for those loyal sons and

daughters who did, to the best of their power, their

Father’s business.

Life was not snuffed out in death. Rather, in St.

Paul’s magnificent figure of speech, life was planted

like a grain of wheat in the earth to rise in the full

fruition of a complete and perfect life.

Friends and lovers were not snatched away from

us and swallowed up in black, intolerable oblivion.

They slipped through the gateway across which

falls an impenetrable curtain. But beyond that cur-

tain, they live in deepest happiness; they know us

and love us and wait for us to join them in the per-

fect bliss of God’s presence.

Modern pagans have sneered at what they liked

to picture as the Christian Heaven, laughing at its

“psalms and harps, its golden streets and ivory

gates, its wings and angel choruses, and the hosan-

nas of the saints.” Which is just as silly as sneering

at the lovely figures of speech by which a lover de-

scribes the swanlike neck, the raven hair, the lily

hands, and rose bud lips of his beloved. Pity the

poor pagans who cannot understand the joys of

Heaven because they boggle at a simile.

The Catholic, however, knows that Heaven

means the eternal possession of God Himself. Our

restless quest for truth and beauty, the great long-

ing by which we want to know and want to love and

be loved, will at last, with that possession of God, be

satisfied. In the infinite God is all truth, all beauty.

Every detail of earth’s perfection is a small copy of

God. Every truth the mind discovers with laborious

searching is founded on the divine essence. And



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 75

Heaven brings us face to face with this exhaustless

beauty and truth.

If the explorer or the scientist, if the writer or

the historian, attains to heights of happiness when

he discovers some fragment of truth, who can im-

agine or describe the happiness of the human being

suddenly discovering the source of all that truth as

he looks upon its author, God?

There is no human joy like the joy of loving and

being loved. Yet on earth, the purest love is limited

and sometimes wearisome, ending in boredom or in

death. In spite of repeated failures of love, the

heart goes on craving for a love endlessly, complete-

ly satisfying. .

,
And in Heaven it finds that love. God is infinite-

ly beautiful, the great exemplar to which all human

beauty bears some faint resemblance. And He loves

us with an everlasting love that, incredibly enough,

craves our love in return. The soul standing before

God’s infinite beauty, stretches out with a glad cry

knowing that throughout eternity, love will rise in a

glorious tidal wave as new beauties and perfections

are endlessly revealed.

Heaven a place of boredom or weariness or in-

activity? Why, at last we shall be released for the

supreme activities of our soul, endlessly exploring

the infinite truth that is God, endlessly loving and

being loved by the God Whose beauty is faintly sug-

gested in the glory of sunsets, the calm face of a

woman, the warm comradeship of men, the unselfish

love of mothers, the exquisite contours of flowers and

precious stones, the inexhaustible glory of the earth

and sky He fashioned.

Eternity will be all too short to spend rising to

a fuller and ever developing knowledge of God’s



76 THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH

limitless truth, sinking ourselves more and more

completely in the boundless love of an Infinite Lover

awakening an unfading love in return.

What then is life for the man with faith? Why

then is the heart of the believer the happiest heart

in the world?

While for the man without faith life is lived

under the unbroken darkness of night or the misty,

disturbing clouds that he cannot pierce, try as he

will, while he finds the world without meaning and

the future without real hope, the man with faith

looks upon life and knows that, whatever its prob-

lems and difficulties and the soiling effects of sin, it

is a beautiful and glorious adventure. Life rises

from its source in God, awakened through the great

love of a divine Father preparing earth for His be-

loved sons and daughters. Life moves not through

uncertainties and doubts but through the white,

piercing light of faith. There is happiness to be

found by any man who beats back the wolves of sin

and keeps himself young and strong and decent

through high integrity of character and deep regard

for virtue and the heroism of sanctity. Over life

broods the tender love of an infinite Father. At

our side through life walks a divine Comrade, Lead-

er, and Lover. We can take life’s bruises and joys to
the understanding bosom of a heavenly Mother. We
move in the company of the world’s noblest men

and women.

And at the end, guaranteed to us by our divine

Teacher and proved to us by His Own resurrection

from the dead, awaits the endless happiness of see-

ing God and knowing and loving and possessing Him

together with all the dear things of experience that

we have ever known and loved.



THE HAPPINESS OF FAITH 77

All this comes to the man who believes.

All this is bound together in the glorious syn-

thesis of life given by the good God to the man who

prays on bended knees for the happiness of faith.

i



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“Rural Catholic Action,” by Rev. Dr. Edgar Schmiedeler, O. S. B., 24
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“Conflicting Standards,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., 80 pages

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