Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.
Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live.
Joy, which is 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 Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears.
[Jesus] 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.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
