Page:The Power of the Spirit.djvu/96

 Rh withdrawn; and I am afraid that most people associate 'joy' in religious language with something rather wry-mouthed, or at best with the ecstatic, melancholy smile of the cheap prints. There is also a long tradition of gloom and harshness, which predominated in many religious circles not so long ago, and of which the memory is bitter and hateful in men's minds to-day: what sensible men thought of it can be readily seen in the novelists of the last century—in Butler's Way of All Flesh, in Thackeray, and George Eliot, and in some of Dickens's blackest characters—Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, Murdstone in David Copperfield, or Esther's godmother in Bleak House, where the gloom is as many can remember that it once was—associated with a grim heartlessness and with much positive cruelty. In the home of the Pilgrim Fathers I need not dwell upon this, except to say that the unpopularity of professional religious folk, which still exists, is not without well-remembered justification. Joyousness has not been a special characteristic of the 'black-coated gentry', nor indeed have the Social Qualities which we shall touch on again in a moment. Now joy carries with it good temper, generosity, and kindliness of heart: it also is greater than mere cheerfulness, and includes it; therefore where we do not find cheerfulness, hilarity, gaiety, we may suspect that joy is absent too. Joy includes them all, being itself the highest; and it is the source,