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BYWAYS TO BLESSEDNESS 49

jubilation of the saint! No true teacher promises sorrow as the ultimate of life; he promises joy. He
points to sorrow, but only as a process which sin has rendered necessary. Where self ends grief
passes away. Joy is the companion of righteousness. In the divine life tender compassion fills the
place where weeping sorrow sat. During the process of becoming unselfish there are periods of
deep sorrow. Purification is necessarily severe. All becoming is painful. Abiding joy is its
completion is realised only in the perfection of being, and this is

“A state
Where all is loveliness, and power and love,
With all sublimest qualities of mind,
Where all
Enjoy entire dominion o’er themselves.
Acts, feelings, thoughts, conditions, qualities.”

Consider how a flower evolves and becomes; at first there is a little germ groping its way in the
dark soil towards the upper light; then the plant appears, and leaf is added unto leaf; and finally
the perfected flower appears, in the sweet perfume and chaste beauty of which all effort ceases.
So, with human life; at first the blind groping for the light in the dark soil of selfishness and
ignorance; then the coming into the light, and the gradual overcoming of selfishness with its
accompanying pain and sorrow; and finally the perfect flower of a pure, unselfish life, giving forth,
without effort, the perfume of holiness and the beauty of joy.
The good, the pure, are the superlatively happy. However men may argumentatively deny or
qualify this, humanity instinctively knows it to be true. Do not men everywhere picture their
angels as the most joyful of beings? There are joyful angels in bodies of flesh; we meet them and
pass on; and how many of those who come in contact with them are sufficiently pure to see vision
within the form — to see the incorruptible angel in its common instrument of clay?

“They needs must grope who cannot see,
The blade before the ear must be;
The outward symbols disappear
From him whose inward sight is clear.”

Yes; the pure are the joyful. We look almost in vain for any expressions of sorrow in the words
of Jesus. The “Man of Sorrows” is only completed in the Man of Joy.
“I, Buddha, who wept with all my brother’s tears,
Whose heart was broken by a whole world’s woe,
Laugh and am glad, for there is Liberty!”

In sin, and in the struggle against sin, there is unrest and affliction, but in the perfection of

Truth, in the path of Righteousness, there is abiding joy.
“Enter the Path! There spring the healing streams
Quenching all thirst! There bloom th’ immortal flowers