| J. R. Miller | Page 16 |
A man without cheerfulness is a sick man. The sadness of his spirit lays a withering blight on all the beauty of his life. He becomes prematurely old. His strength decays. “A broken spirit drieth up the bones.” But cheerfulness is medicine. It promotes health. Physicians say that a cheerful spirit in a patient is a large factor in the cure of sickness. One who admits to himself and others that he is sick is indeed sick; but one who declines to make such admission, and cheerfully goes on as if he were well, conquers many an ailment which, if he had succumbed to it, might have proved serious. Cheerfulness is a prime secret of health. It keeps one well. It keeps one young; it is one of the secrets of eternal youth.
It is a fancy of Swedenborg, with a good philosophy in it, that in heaven the oldest angels are the youngest. All life there is toward youth. One reason must be that all life there is cheerful and joyous. If the people in heaven still fretted, and complained, and got discouraged, and went about with heavy hearts and long faces, cheerless and despondent, as so many heaven-bound pilgrims do here, they would get very old by the time they had been a few millenniums in heaven. But being allways of good cheer, they keep always young, growing ever towards youth. Even here on the earth, too, the same secret holds true, that abounding, cheerfulness keeps one young in spite of advancing years. Thus cheerfulness carries its reward and blessing in itself. It is its own benediction. It weaves its own garment of beauty. It builds its own home of glory.
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