ally, to believe it intuitively, and another
to prove it through experience that shall test the quality of faith and
conviction. Learning this supreme truth of life through outward
experiences as well as though inner revelation, is a victory of the will
that may even make itself an epoch, a landmark, in spiritual progress.

One of the great discourses of Phillips Brooks had for its theme the
lesson of not laying too much stress on the recognition of one's
motives or on any return of sympathetic consideration. "Let me not
think," said Bishop Brooks, "that I get nothing from the man who
misunderstands all my attempts to serve him and who scorns me when I
know that I deserve his sympathy. Ah! it would be sad enough if only the
men who understood us and were grateful to us when we gave ourselves to
them had help to give us in return. The good reformer whom you try to
help in his reform, and who turns off from you contemptuously because he
distrusts you, seeing that your ways are different from his, does not
make you happy,--he makes you unhappy; but he makes you good, he leads
you to a truer insight, a more profound unselfishness. And so (it is the
old lesson), not until goodness becomes the one thing that you desire,
not until you gauge all growth and gain by that, not until then can you
really know that the law has worked, the promise has been fulfilled.
With what measure you gave yourself to him, he has given himself--the
heart of himself, which is not his favor, not his love, but his
goodness, the real heart of himself to you. For the rest you can easily
wait until you both come to the better world, where misconceptions shall
have passed away and the outward forms and envelopes of things shall
correspond perfectly with their inner substances forever."

In the last analysis one comes to realize that happiness is a condition
depending solely on the relation of his soul to God; that neither life,
nor death, nor principalities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor
any living creature can separate him from it, because happiness and the
love of God are one and identical, and it is not in the power of this
world to give, or to take away, this sense of absolute oneness with the
Divine life that comes when man gives himself, his soul and body, his
hopes and aspirations and ideals, in complete consecration to the will
of God.

For this alone is happiness. It may not be ease nor pleasure, but it is
that ceaseless joy of the so