To those who are really religious, life is beautiful. It is a triumphal march made to music that fills their ears, that brightens their eyes, that lightens their steps, now quicker, now slower, now sad, now joyous, always beautiful. Who are the happy men and women in this world? Let no one ever doubt--no one who has observed the world will ever doubt; they are the people who have religion. No matter what the religion is, no matter what the theory or dogma or creed, no matter the colour or climate, there is no difference. If you doubt, go and see. Never sit in your closet and study creeds and declare "No man can be happy who believes such," but go and see whether they are happy. Go to all the peoples of the world, and having put aside your prejudices, having tuned your heart-strings to theirs, listen and you will know. Watch and you will see. What is the keynote of the life of him who truly believes? Is it disgust, weariness, pessimism? Is it not courage and a strange triumph that marks his way in life? And who are those who go through life sadly, who find it terrible in its monotony, who have lost all savour for beauty, whom the sunlight cannot gladden, who neither love nor hate, neither fear nor rejoice, neither laugh nor cry? I will tell you who they are. There are two kinds, who think they are different, but are the same. First, there are those who call themselves philosophers, men who have abandoned all religion and accepted "barren reason." For reason cannot make you love or hate, or laugh or weep. There is no beauty there, no light and shadow, no colour, only the greyness of unliving outline. And there are those who mistake what religion is. They think it consists of creeds. They do not know it consists of emotions. And so they take their creeds to their hearts, and see what they make of them! Or they, abandoning their creeds, search all through the world to find new creeds. They speculate on Nirvana, on Brahm, on the doctrine of Averroes. They are for ever digging out some abstruse problem from the sacred books of the world to make themselves miserable over. They, too, are the victims of a barren reason. But religion is not reason; it is fact. It is beyond and before all reason. Religion is not what you say, but what you feel; not what you think, but what you know. Religions are the great optimisms. Each is to its believers "the light of the world." I cannot think how this has not been evident long ago to everyone. Have men no eyes, no ears, no understanding? Yes, perhaps they have all these things. But what they have not got is sympathy, and without this of what use are the rest? For what men see and hear in any matter are the things they are in sympathy with. If your heart is out of tune, there is never any echo of the melody that is about you.