all baptized into joy. Even the solitary
creatures that carry their narrow houses with them have their joys,
which are well known to their intimate acquaintances. So in the world
of adult man we find the joy of life disproportionate to condition and
faculty. In the faces of the men we meet on the streets we see many
scars and dark lines of storm and care; only seldom do the faces we
meet there wear the rainbow. Men are without joy because they have
violated the laws of nature, they have subordinated their manly powers,
reason and conscience to their animal instincts; they have lived by
wrong theories and wrong methods, and for unmanly ends, and thus have
exhausted the joy of life's banquet.

A man can have deep and continuous joy only if his life is continuously
rational and progressively manly. He must put away childish things and
live for truth and right, for love and immortal virtue. If our hearts
sadden as our years increase and our thoughts widen, it is because
there has been a defect in our vision and a sophistry in the logic of
our conduct. If the growing corn comes only to the blade and to the
ear, and not to the full golden corn in the ear, we may be sure it is
because there has been something wrong in our gardening. Christ comes
into our wasting life to give us a new, a higher and a better joy; to
give us new truth, new faith, new arguments, new motives, new impulses
and new joys. Christ gives us the Heavenly Father, and thus lifts us
into the dignity and beatitude of a divine nature, relationship and
destiny. Man is a child of the skies, and can not find rest complete
and joy abiding in anything less or lower. Bearing now the image of
the earthly, we must go on to bear the image of the heavenly. To have
our manly joy ever increasing we must keep the heavenly in sight and
take our way from it.

Christ brings us into the living alliance with forces and personalities
that are spiritual, and thus makes us strong to resist all animal
temptations and those impulses toward greed and wrong which, if
indulged, drain our life of its manly felicities. He would have us
lift our manly cups to God, and make their rims to touch the heavens.
Christ would have us to live for other's welfare and to know the joy of
duty and of sacrifice. It is the man who is living for wife, and
child, and neighbor, who has flung himself with all his might into the
carrying forward of some great cause that blesses his fellow-men,