The Untroubled Mind | Page 4

Often enough we cannot promise a cure, but we must be
prepared to give something better.
A great deal of the fatigue and unhappiness of the world is due to the
fact that we do not go deep enough in our justification for work or play,
or for any experience, happy or sad. There is a good deal of a void after
we have said, "Art for art's sake," or "Play for the joy of playing," or
even after we have said, "I am working for the sake of my family, or
for some one who needs my help." That is not enough; and whether we
realize it or not, the lack of deeper justification is at the bottom of a
restlessness and uncertainty which we might not be willing to

acknowledge, but which nevertheless is very real.
I am not satisfied when some moralist says, "Be good and you will be
happy." The kind of happiness that comes from a perfunctory goodness
is a thing which I cannot understand, and which I certainly do not want.
If I work and play and serve and employ, making up the fabric of a
busy life, if I attain a very real happiness, I am tormented by the desire
to know why I am doing it, and I am not satisfied with the answer I
usually get. The patient may not be cured when he is relieved of his
anæmia, or when his emaciation has given place to the plumpness and
suppleness and physical strength that we call health. The man whom
we look upon as well, and who has never known physical illness, is not
well in the larger sense until he knows why he is working, why he is
living, why he is filling his life with activity. In spite of the elasticity
and spring of the world's interests, there must come often, and with a
kind of fatal insistence, the deep demand for a cause, for a justification.
If there is not an adequate significance behind it, life, with all its
courage and accomplishment, seems but a sorry thing, so full of pathos,
even in its brightest moments, so shadowed with a sense of loss and of
finality that the bravest heart may well fail and the truest courage relax,
supported only by the assurance that this way lies happiness or that
right is right.
What is this knowledge that the world is seeking, but can never find?
What is this final justification? If we seek it in its completeness, we are
doomed always to be ill and unsatisfied. If we are willing to look only a
little way into the great question, if we are willing to accept a little for
the whole, content because it is manifestly part of the final knowledge,
and because we know that final knowledge rests with God alone, we
shall understand enough to save us from much sorrow and painful
incompleteness.
There is, in the infinitely varied and beautiful world of nature, and in
the hearts of men, so much of beauty and truth that it is a wonder we do
not all realize that these things of common life may be in us and for us
the daily and hourly expression of the infinite being we call God. We
do not see God, but we do feel and know so much that we may fairly

believe to be of God that we do not need to see Him face to face. It is
something more than imagination to feel that it is the life of God in our
lives, so often unrecognized or ignored, that prompts us to all the
greatness and the inspiration and the accomplishment of the world. If
we could know more clearly the joy of such a conception, we should
dry up at its source much of the unhappiness which is, in a deep and
subtle way, at the bottom of many a nervous illness and many a
wretched existence.
The happiness which is found in the recognition of kinship with God,
through the common things of life, in the experiences which are so
significant that they could not spring from a lesser source, the
happiness which is not sought, but which is the inevitable result of such
recognition--this experience goes a long way toward making life worth
living.
If we do have this conception of life, then some of the old, old
questions that have vexed so many dwellers upon the earth will no
longer be a source of unhappiness or of illness of mind or body. The
question of immortality, for instance, which has made us afraid to die,
will no longer be a question--we shall not need to answer it, in the
presence of God, in our lives and in the world about us. We shall