anything, but only in giving.  I repeat, there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving.  And half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness.  They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others.  It consists in giving and serving others.  He that would be great among you, said Christ, let him serve.  He that would be happy, let him remember that there is but one way—­it is more blest, it is more happy, to give than to receive.

The next ingredient is a very remarkable one:  good temper.  “Love is not easily provoked.”  Nothing could be more striking than to find this here.  We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness.  We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man’s character.  And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements in human nature.

The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous.  It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character.  You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or “touchy” disposition.  This compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics.  The truth is, there are two great classes of sins—­sins of the body, and sins of the disposition.  The Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first, the Elder Brother of the second.  Now society has no doubt whatever as to which of these is the worse.  Its brands fall without a challenge, upon the Prodigal.  But are we right?  We have no balance to weigh one another’s sins, and coarser and finer are but human words; but faults in the higher nature may be less venial than those in the lower, and to the eye of Him who is love, a sin against love may seem a hundred times more base.  No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to unchristianize society than evil temper.  For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom off childhood, in short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence stands alone.  Look at the Elder Brother, moral, hard-working, patient, dutiful—­let him get all credit for his virtues—­look at this man, this baby, sulking outside his own father’s door.  “He was angry,” we read, “and would not go in.”  Look at the effect upon the father, upon the servants, upon the happiness of the guests.  Judge of the effect upon the Prodigal—­and how many prodigals are kept out of the kingdom of God by the unlovely character of those who profess to be inside?  Analyze, as a study in temper, the thunder-cloud itself as it gathers upon the Elder