Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/110

Rh children. There is pleasure in watching games and sports played by others. There is yet greater pleasure in our own singing, dancing, walking, running, riding, driving, playing, roaming in a forest buzzing with life or in the fields of waving grass, skating, swimming, having a plunge in cool surging waves of the ocean on a summer day or rowing amid the rhythmic plash of the oars and a variety of entertainments.

The enlightened find joy in rational pastimes. They saunter in literary bypaths and find incalculable joy in literature, art, music, and other occupations of the mind. For them there is no delight to compare with the intellectual delights. There is no joy greater than that which one who is consumed with the desire to add something to human knowledge or to further human health and happiness experiences when, deeply engrossed in inventing and discovering, after concentrated observation and protracted experimenting he hits upon a right solution of the problem of his search. The products of such creative minds in the fields of arts and sciences have made life more livable. When we get wearied of our workaday world, it is enlivening to court the company of books. Our cares and sorrows are forgotten for a time, and we get a soothing message to embolden us to face life's problems. We greet thinkers and sages, poets and writers, historians and travellers, the great and the noble, the mighty and the heroic that have lived in ages past. The fatigue of our minds leaves us, the anguish of our hearts disappears, and we are refreshed. Joy and hope prepare us for our duties of life.

It is a boon to live, says Zarathushtra. He teaches everyone to enliven his mind with sunny cheerfulness, to be gay of heart and buoyant of spirit. He exhorts him to say Yea to life with overflowing enthusiasm and overplus joy.

Happiness unto him who gives happiness unto others. Thus says Zarathushtra at the gray dawn of history. The sublime precept is again and again imparted to mankind in their days by Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus and is contained in the Pentateuch and the Book of Tobit. The noblest of mankind live to make others happy. Kindly feelings for others make them insensible to their own privations. They impose privation upon themselves to save something for the needy. They place service before self and expose their lives and limbs to imminent danger