than to personal joy.

"The Magi," it is said, "have but to follow their Star in peace.... The
Divine action marvellously adjusts all things. The order of God sends
each moment the appropriate instrument for its work, and the soul,
enlightened by faith, finds all things good, desiring neither more nor
less than she possesses."

One may tread,--not the "whole round of creation," as Browning phrases
it, but a minor segment of it, at least, and come back with added and
more profound conviction that happiness is a condition of the spirit;
that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful"; that the incidents and accidents
of the outward life cannot mar nor lessen that sense of higher peace and
joy and harmony which is the atmosphere of any true spiritual life. One
may recognize and affirm this truth by spiritual intuition, and he may
then be led through many phases of actual tests in actual life; he may,
for a time, lose his hold on it and come to say that happiness is a
thing that depends on so many causes outside one's own control; that
illness, death, loss of friends, adverse circumstances, failures and
trials of all kinds may come into his experience, and that one is at the
mercy of all these vicissitudes. Can the individual be happy, he will
ask, when all that made happiness is taken away? Can he be happy if he
has lost all his worldly goods? or if death has taken those nearest and
dearest to him? or if the separations of life, far harder to bear than
those of death, have come into his experience with their almost hopeless
sense of desolation? And yet, until he has learned to answer these
questions with the most triumphant affirmative, he has not learned the
measure nor sounded the depth of a true and noble order of Happiness.
The difference is that of being safely on board a great steamer when
wind and wave are tempest-tossed, or of being helpless in the raging
waters. The storm may be precisely the same; the tempest may rage as it
will, but safe and secure in the cabin or stateroom, the voyager does
not mind its fury. Truly may this analogy be held in life. It is
possible to emerge from the winds and waves; to enter so entirely into
the sense of security in the Divine; to hold so absolutely the faith in
the Divine leading, that even in the midst of trial and loss and
deprivation and sorrow, one shall come to _know_, through his own
experience, that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful." For it is one thing
to accept a truth theoretic