The happiness of faith


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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“Conflicting Standards,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., 80 pages
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“The Hymn of the Conquered,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 128
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“What Civilization Owes to the Church,” by Rt. Rev. Williami Quinn,
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“Misunderstanding the Church,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Duane G. Hunt^
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