Has One a Right to Happiness?
From the Sunday School Times "Has one a right to happiness?" asks a widely scattered advertisement of a would-be epoch-making book promulgating "liberal" ideas upon divorce. The implication is that the answer must unmistakably be "Yes." For the right to happiness is quite generally conceded. In this, people are in accord with a venerable document of our republican faith which asserts that man has certain inalienable rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the truth of which we have for one hundred and forty years been illustrating by electrocuting certain of our citizens, shutting up others, and providing social and other conditions which have made life a long misery for many more. That, other things not being neglected, a good God or an intelligent government will seek the happiness of the greatest number of their subjects or citizens, can not be disputed. But these other things must be considered and some of them must be considered first. The easy notion that "one has a right to happiness" is the cause of more than nine tenths, if indeed it is not the cause of all, the sin, foulness, strife, and unhappiness in the world. Wipe out the idea, and replace it with the truth, and the long and shameful record of the divorced, and, alas, of many of the undivorced, would disappear at a breath. The question, "Has one a right to happiness?" is compounded of several dangerous ethical errors. It assumes that a man or a woman is "one," when as a matter of fact we are each both less and more than one. We are fractions, which must be completed by many other lives to make a full and rounded unity. No one can rightly consider any problem of life unless he considers the many others that make up his life. And each one of us is also part of a half-dozen, a dozen, a hundred others, in our touch on other lives, in our weight and influence and bearing upon our fellows. Any soul that approaches a moral question with "one" on his lips starts fatally wrong. If we take next on our lips the words "a right," we move fatally farther astray. When we are considering another man, and what he can be, or what we can or ought to do for him, "right" is the word; but from the angle of what we are to seek for ourselves, it would be an incalculable boon to the world if "right" could be forever expunged from the human vocabulary. The only real justification any man has for standing up for his "rights" is lest his failure to do so should breed in the body politic the bad habit of injustice. But that is not on his own account; it is simply that society may be clear of sin, and others may receive their due. Imagine what a world this would become if all men, or the majority of men, at once ceased to strive for rights and began to live only for duties! Perhaps an even more fatal error is wrapped up in that word "happiness." The spirit that asks if we have a right to that, and proposes to climb to it over the broken laws of God and man, has utterly misconceived what happiness is. In its original meaning happiness was a state of "good hap," the fortunate state, the state that had received the best that could come to it, or at least a very genuine good. It was the heathen synonym for the Christian "blessed," given by impartial fate or capricious deities, where the latter, blessedness, is bestowed by all-wise and holy beneficence. But neither of these conceptions finds place in the word as it is used in this question. Happiness here is pleasant human association, congenial companionship, satisfied and yet unsated desire, delights, pleasure, "thrills." In the light of that definition, which is clearly the one foremost in the questioner's mind, is it possible to answer "Yes"? Of course we have no right to be happy, no right to any combination of personal pleasurable relationship or feeling, at the expense of a broken law of God. True, many of those who flatly insist on this "right" question whether God is, or whether He has made such laws. But those who have been reared in reverence for God and His Book, who have seen in Jesus Christ a competent Lawgiver as well as a capable Saviour, will be slow to buy emotional satisfaction at such a price. And it would be well for the others to examine once again the "law and the testimony," and the deep, wise, universal, eternal principles on which they are based. The happiness that is won at the cost of lowering our own high ideals, coarsening or blunting our own delicacy of conscience, dethroning the spirit of its supremacy over the flesh, abandoning our fidelity to promise, and violating the rights of others, is a costly gain. The substitution of self-gratification, as a motive, for fairness, duty, helpfulness, works fatal havoc on the soul. The fact that such havoc is also accompanied by spiritual blindness and insensibility explains, no doubt, the small effect such considerations as this have on those who contemplate or have taken the step. "But," says one, "have we not a right to happiness if we obey the rules of the game?" We shall never have the great questions of morals and duty put on the right foundation till we learn to answer even this question, and with an eternal emphasis, "No!" It is rather a bold thing, at the start, for any man to talk about his "rights" in the presence of God. Paul would have laughed, or shuddered, at that. The clay making inquisition of the potter! "Right" implies some claim derived from action on our part. And when we have done all, we shall be obliged to say, "Unprofitable servants: we have done that which it was our duty to do;" For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to Thee. The proper human attitude toward joy or pain, "happiness" or sorrow, is, "Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Thy sight." Yet, looked at in imagination from the divine side, that of the heavenly Father, who desires to do most for His earthly children, is not happiness the one gift He seeks to have them inherit? Even here, we must realize that happiness is no soul's primary right, or good, or aim. At best it is a by-product. If we do look forward with the eye of faith and see the proposition of human faithfulness, goodness, and character, with the divine love and power, worked out into its final accompaniments of unbroken heavenly peace, joy, rapture, we are very certain that the one main aim is the deed and the character, and not the feeling. We are very certain of another thing,—that, in the stage in which we now are, the feeling is entirely subsidiary and incidental, and ever and again omissible. We might be "happy" forever, and forever miss life's goal. We might never once be "happy," and yet gloriously gain life's goal. We are not here to be happy. We are here to be harmless, and holy, and helpful. We are here to be coworkers with God in the world's redemption. We are here to battle for the right and against the wrong. We are here to fight and foil the adversary of souls. This light thing called "happiness" has small place in the vocabulary of a soul that has weight or vision. God's men have not been "happy" men. They have been men pressed down by burdens, pierced with the pangs of human suffering and sin; like their own Lord, "men of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." They have had sunshine, "the light that never was on land or sea." They have had peace, "such peace as the world neither gives nor takes." They have had joy, the joy of the warrior, of the life-saver, of the heart-fellow of Jesus Christ. They have not missed entirely the finer, lighter pleasures of loving humanity; indeed, of these they have had the finest. They may, or may not, know the love of wife and children; they certainly know the sweet fellowship of human love, service, gratitude. But, appreciating these things to the full, they have counted none of them dear and weighty beside this; "To accomplish Thy work!" A "right to happiness"! Let the child about his play ask that; but let the full-grown man or woman, made in the image of God, made for God, ask only one right, that right itself a glorious gift of grace: the right to spend and be spent for humanity; the right to be a beneficent spiritual power in this world; the right to walk in the very footsteps of Christ!