I found this book from G.K. Chesterton called Orthodoxy. It talks about how sorrow is inevitably a part of us right now, but never the most important part and what is essential to humanity is joy because of the nature of who God is in life. The last chapter talks about how we live in a world that looks at it the other way around right now – they think that joy is superficial and despair is deep. So read these two portions and see what you think and compare them to the words that were sung by George Beverly Shea.
Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack on Christianity as a
thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the
unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable
than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was,
as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite
prepared to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral. But the extraordinary thing is this. They did
prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete satisfaction) that Christianity was too
pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II., they began to prove to me that it was a great deal
too optimistic. One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid
tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of Nature. But another
accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them in a
pink-and-white nursery. One great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful
enough, and why it was hard to be free. Another great agnostic objected that Christian
optimism, “the garment of make-believe woven by pious hands,” hid from us the fact
that Nature was ugly, and that it was impossible to be free. One rationalist had hardly
done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise.
This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the
black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the
Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so
uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it. If it falsified human vision it must falsify it
one way or another; it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles. I rolled
on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the taunts which
Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of the creed —
“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has
grown gray with Thy breath.”
But when I read the same poet’s accounts of paganism (as in “Atalanta”), I gathered
that the world was, if possible, more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than
afterwards. The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself was pitch dark.
And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it. The very man who denounced
Christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist. I thought there must be something
wrong. And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be
the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account,
had neither one nor the other.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the
Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from
which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The
tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other,
above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost
casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never
concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such
as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and
imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger.
He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they
expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with
reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness.
There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.
There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous
isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He
walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
Disciple 