A deep enjoying nature is one of God’s best gifts to man. The happy man is generally the best of his breed. The good are usually happy, and the happy are usually good. There are no short cuts to being happy, you must be really good to win through. If our daily occupation is congenial to our taste and disposition, our mind dwells at ease and our nature mellows in the sunshine of agreeable surroundings. Our sense of contentment radiates good humour and makes us kindly and benevolent to others. We are not chafed and fretted by duties irksome to us, because uncongenial. We are fulfilling destiny, and fulfilling it with completeness of purpose. Those around us feel the warm, penetrating sunshine of our hearts, and they grow warm under the mystic touch of the sun. It is for this reason that happiness becomes a holy quest with us, for out of it spring the virtues which robe life in beauty and gladness. One of the most precious of human faculties is the power to enjoy. Self-denial is either a tyranny or a virtue, and should be praised with circumspection. Many feverishly religious people debase its moral currency. They hinder their own happiness and thwart the happiness of others as far as in them lies, and fancy in so doing they keep the whole ten commandments of God. Self-denial for the sake of self-denial is a pagan rite: cold, pitiless, sterile. Renunciation and suffering prove nothing. Men have renounced and suffered for the greed of gold, for the lust of ambition, for the honour of a blood-stained idol, and lost moral stamina in so doing. The experience of ages brands deep the flaming truth upon us that sacrifice must be valued according to the object for which the sacrifice is made. Sacrifice for its own sake weaves no crown of glory for the martyr’s brow. It is a form of amiable suicide. If you starve yourself for the sake of showing mastery over self, what thank have ye? The heathen do even the same--and do it better. It is an act of self-torture, and ministers to your pride of purpose. But to give up a meal when hungry that one you love may have it puts a better complexion on the deed. To bear pain for the grim joy of bearing it brings no reward. Do not even the Stoics the same? But to bear pain rather than surrender truth or to cover a suffering friend is a loving and heroic act, meriting a V.C. when spiritual honours are distributed. The old painters pictured in glowing witchery of colour the ordeal by suffering as the master-key that opened the gates of paradise to macerated mortals. The old writers drove home the same insidious error with all the pious fervour of their fluent pen, and thus men became fascinated with the doctrine of self-immolation as the highest good. In mediæval times the _via dolorosa_ was the well-trodden public way travelled by sainted pilgrims seeking a better country.