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And what is joy? Equally with love it seems to elude and escape definition, and in some sense to baffle an intelligible description of its nature. But possibly joy may be something like this, an outward expression of a happiness which is absorbing and real. There is, for example, the genuine joy of a little child shouting in his games, absorbed in the pursuit of the moment; there is the deeper joy penetrating even to the face of an intellectual man, as he is "enjoying" some scientific pursuit; and there is a joy, the peculiar property of the soul, which hangs with a pervading fragrance round the writings of the saints and their books of devotion, so much so, that sometimes their words seem strange and unreal to our colder hearts; a joy which indicates a satisfaction which the world can neither give nor take away. So that we might further describe joy as the radiant atmosphere which plays around pleasure; and if pleasure is, roughly speaking, satisfaction, and the highest pleasure the highest satisfaction, joy will be the illumination, half conscious, half unconscious, which plays about the life of true pleasure. Sometimes we may fancy that even an inanimate machine, with its beautiful adjustments and nice mechanism, seems to work with a smoothness which is almost joy; but in this great engine of life it is no fancy; its harmonious working is joy, and joy gives it strength to cut and carve the various materials, rough and smooth, which come before it. And icy gives it strength, so that there shall be no slurred or jagged or twisted or perverted work. "The joy of the Lord is your strength." "The excellence of the work is, caeteris paribus, in proportion to the joy of the workman." And it has been pointed out in a recent sermon that this was the dominant note which rang through the first proclamations of Christianity — joy. "Sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing," is the very watchword of The Christian. It is joy which is in the very front of our Saviour's teaching in the Beatitudes: it is His last legacy before His Passion, "These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." "Your sorrow shall be turned into joy." "Your joy no man taketh from you." "Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." It is the peculiar province of the Church, that it is fulfilled with a ministration of joy. And the simple "power of being pleased" is in itself not to be despised. We mistake sometimes our coldness and sternness, and that dignified nil admirari, for something else than it really is. There is such a thing as rust, and the dust of long work, and the wearing out of unrenewed strength, over which the oil of gladness has no power. Remember that man alone can laugh, and delight in the deeper joys of nature and the glories of art. Ah, there are innumerable little ducts and channels through which it seems meant that the "oil of gladness" should be poured into our life. "Consider the lillies," says our blessed Lord, as if parts of nature were designed expressly to give us delight, in the unfolding beauty and splendour displayed before our eyes! What fields of wonder and enchantment open upon us through the imaginative faculty! What subtile and pure pleasures art and music conjure up before us! What force there is in such words as "recreation" and "amusement"! Nothing short of a complete renewal of our jaded nature, or the very enchanting us away by the thraldom of an engrossing delight. Are all these things to be lightly set aside or "despised"? Is companionship nothing, or the society of books which brings us into contact with the great minds of all ages? And joy has its distinguishing marks and characteristics, as well as "love," the freshness and verdure which mark out its course. And one of these surely will be HOPEFULNESS: "joyful through hope," is what we pray that every baptized person may be, as he passes through the difficulties of the world. It is a characteristic of joy that makes us so hopeful; so that in the warm rush of delight a man does not even know when he is beaten, but presses on to victory, through failure and defeat which had otherwise crushed him. How many a man has surmounted apparently insuperable obstacles, because joy has whispered to hope, and hope has said, "It can be done." And a second characteristic will be BRIGHTNESS. It makes all the difference to life if joy is shining within. It sheds a rainbow light across the darkest storm. And brightness not only makes a difference to our own lives, but also to the lives of other people, if instead of the creaking, groaning machinery, they have in its place the smooth, easy, joyous life before their eyes.. Benevolent people talk of brightening the homes of the poor, and it is a blessed work to attempt; but bright lives do a great deal to cheer and help all around them. Perhaps others are bearing their cross better, or doing their work with greater ease, because they can walk in our brightness; whereas gloom and melancholy, and "the indolent rebellion of complaint," would cause them to loosen their hold from very weariness, and then to fall crushed and broken below. And a third characteristic of joy may well be EVENNESS. A life in which there is nothing of those alternations of depression and excitement, of exultation and despair, which cause it to expand and contract with a suddenness which well-nigh cracks it in two; a variableness so wearisome to the man himself, so painful to his friends. Instead of this, joy sheds abroad a quiet, even glow, all over work, just as God Himself, in His wondrous love, has an evenness of beauty in all forms of His working. There is the beauty of the spring life and the beauty of the autumn decay, the beauty of-the summer sun and the beauty of the winter cloud. So with us, however varied and diversified the work of our life may be in its vicissitudes and changes, still the evenness of joy with which we work may be uniform, until death itself comes as only one more day's experience "with God onwards." "Rejoice in the Lord alway; and again I say, rejoice."

(W. C. E. Newbolt.)

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KJV: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,

WEB: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith,