it is a happier way than any other.  The most obvious lesson in Christ’s teaching is that there is no happiness in having and getting anything, but only in giving.  I repeat, there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving.  Half the world is on the wrong scent in pursuit of happiness.  They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others.  It consists in giving, and in 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 blessed, it is more happy, to give than to receive.”

The next ingredient is a very remarkable one:  Good temper. “Love is not 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 brand falls, 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 venal 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 un-Christianize 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 of childhood, in short,

          FOR SHEER GRATUITOUS MISERY-PRODUCING POWER

this influence stands alone.