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 the Life Radiant. It may not be ease or pleasure, but
it is that ceaseless joy of the soul that may be the daily experience of
every human being. And to gain the deep inner conviction of this sublime
truth is worth whatever it may cost of tears or trial. It is the
threshold of joy. It is the initiation into a higher spiritual state
which one may gain in his progress while on earth as well as in heaven.
In fact, no one is really fitted for the highest privileges and
sweetness he may crave until he has learned to live well, to live
joyfully, without them. No one is fitted for joy until he can live well
_without_ joy. It is the law and the prophets.

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 to him? 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 o