The Socratic attitude is better than the high-bred attitude; it is better than the stoical attitude; it is even better than the pious attitude, because it depends upon living life to the uttermost, rather than upon detaching oneself from what one considers rather a poor business.  The attitude of Socrates is based upon courage, generosity, simplicity.  He knows that it is with fear that we weight our melancholy sensibilities, that it is with meanness and coldness that we poison life, that it is with complicated conventional duties that we fetter our weakness.  Socrates has no personal ambitions, and thus he is rid of all envy and uncharitableness; he sees the world as it is, a very bright and brave place, teeming with interesting ideas and undetermined problems.  Where Christianity has advanced upon this—­for it has advanced splendidly and securely—­is in interpreting life less intellectually.  The intellectual side of life is what Socrates adores; the Christian faith is applicable to a far wider circle of homely lives.  Yet Christianity too, in spite of ecclesiasticism, teems with ideas.  Its essence is an unprejudiced freedom of soul.  Its problems are problems of character which the simplest child can appreciate.  But Christianity, too, is built upon a basis of joy.  “Freely ye have received, freely give,” is its essential maxim.

The secret then is to enjoy; but the enjoyment must not be that of the spoiler who carries away all that he can, and buries it in his tent; but the joy of relationship, the joy of conspiring together to be happy, the joy of consoling and sympathising and sharing, because we have received so much.  Of course there remain the limitations of temperament, the difficulty of preventing our own acrid humours from overflowing into other lives; but this cannot be overcome by repression; it can only be overcome by tenderness.  There are very few people who have not the elements of this in their character.  I can count upon my fingers the malevolent men I know, who prefer making others uncomfortable to trying to make them glad; and all these men have been bullied in their youth, and are unconsciously protecting themselves against bullying still.  We grow selfish, no doubt, for want of practice; ill-health makes villains of some of us.  But we can learn, if we desire it, to keep our gruffness for our own consumption, and a very few experiments will soon convince us that there are few pleasures in the world so reasonable and so cheap, as the pleasure of giving pleasure.

But, after all, the resolute cheerfulness that can be to a certain extent captured and secured by an effort of the will, though it is perhaps a more useful quality than natural joy, and no doubt ranks together in the moral scale, is not to be compared with a certain unreasoning, incommunicable rapture which sometimes, without conscious effort or desire, descends upon the spirit, like sunshine after rain.  Let me quote a recent experience of my own which may illustrate it.