Meritorious misery won through, for it was aureoled with the Church’s benediction and rendered attractive by her promise of eternal rewards. Surely this daily human life of ours was not ordained to be a pageant of austerity reaching from the cradle to the grave. The Creator, having given this beautiful world as a temporary home for His children to dwell in, expects agreeable people to occupy its furnished splendours for a space of three score years and ten, more or less. If not, then the Creator’s gift is wasted bounty flung to dull and unappreciative mortals. Brighter and healthier views of life emerge out of the crude misconceptions which enveloped the past in religious gloom, although there yet remain amongst us people who revel in the luxury of self-denial as in a feast of fat things, while the genial side of their nature remains dormant, starved, stunted. I have seen such-like in the flesh, spoken with them and touched their cold hands. They are unattractive people to know, and not companionable to travel with. They are faultless, methodical, patient, but they have no endearing friendships, no entwining intimacies by which you can fasten on them and love them. They are isolated and self-contained, lacking the charm of some little human weakness which makes us all akin. They may have a warm heart, but chilled blood circulates round it. Their eyes glitter like glaciers at the call of duty. They hurry from committee meeting to committee meeting, and forget to lunch between engagements. They shine in the performance of self-imposed errands of mercy, and live by rule relentlessly at any cost to pocket, health, or reputation. They minister to the sick and poor assiduously, and mother a class of poor factory girls in the evening, but their home is shivery to enter as a cold storage. A cold storage is a curious place to visit, but an impossible place to dwell in, except for frozen goods. It is possible to make the best of both worlds without an uncomfortable sense of sin nagging you like toothache; it is possible to work for others and yet tend your own vineyard with whole-hearted joy garnered from the wonder and beauty and sunshine of this our earthly home. The man is not a miscreant who laughs heartily and often: the person is not a saint who starves his body to save his soul.