e measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and
material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have
set on the horizon, how happy they would be! Lacking this gift or that
circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so
measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a
corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my
deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so
thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life,--if, in short, I am
an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
As sinners stand up in meeting and testify to the goodness of God, so
one who is called afflicted may rise up in gladness of conviction and
testify to the goodness of life.

Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face
of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only
darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once I fretted and
beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the
consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven. My life was
without past or future; death, the pessimist would say, "a
consummation devoutly to be wished." But a little word from the
fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and
my heart leaped to the rapture of living. Night fled before the day
of thought, and love and joy and hope came up in a passion of
obedience to knowledge. Can anyone who has escaped such captivity, who
has felt the thrill and glory of freedom, be a pessimist?

My early experience was thus a leap from bad to good. If I tried, I
could not check the momentum of my first leap out of the dark; to move
breast forward is a habit learned suddenly at that first moment of
release and rush into the light. With the first word I used
intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope. Darkness cannot
shut me in again. I have had a glimpse of the shore, and can now live
by the hope of reaching it.

So my optimism is no mild and unreasoning satisfaction. A poet once
said I must be happy because I did not see the bare, cold present, but
lived in a beautiful dream. I do live in a beautiful dream; but that
dream is the actual, the present,--not cold, but warm; not bare, but
furnished with a thousand blessings. The very evil which the poet
supposed would be a cruel disillusionment is necessary to the fullest
knowledge of joy. Only by contact with evil could