and nearness are made irrefutably clear to
those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparable
FEELING OF HAPPINESS which is connected with the nearness, and which is
therefore not only a possible and altogether proper feeling for us to
have here below, but is the best and most indispensable proof of God's
reality. No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore happiness
is the point from which every efficacious new theology should start."

[31] C. Hilty: Gluck, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.

In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the
simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to
be treated on a later day.

In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic
emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom.
I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who,
when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to
feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons
in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the
goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and
in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may he born. From
the outset their religion is one of union with the divine. The
heretics who went before the reformation are lavishly accused by the
church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians
were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It is probable
that there never has been a century in which the deliberate refusal to
think ill of life has not been idealized by a sufficient number of
persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural things
to be permitted. Saint Augustine's maxim, Dilige et quod vis fac--if
you but love [God], you may do as you incline--is morally one of the
profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, with
passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality. According to
their characters they have been refined or gross; but their belief has
been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious
attitude. God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting of evil
was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on the
whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course
infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing,
Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and man