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In his Toccata of Galuppi he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. When in 1883 the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a poem to their Album he immediately complied with the request.
The keenest epicureanism could devise no better means for sucking the last drop of sweetness out of the clustering grapes of the gladnesses of earth than to obey this stringent requirement, and so realise the blessed promise, 'Whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it. The selfish man is a roundabout fool. The self-devoted man, the Christ-enthroning man, is the wise man.
If we carried that spirit with us into all our small duties, sorrows, and gladnesses, how different they would all seem! We should then drink for strength, not for drunkenness. We should not then find that God's gifts hid Him from us. We should neither leave any of them unused nor so greedily grasp them that we let His hand go.
In all other gladnesses there is always in the landscape one bit of sullen shadow somewhere or other, unparticipant of the light, while all around is blazing. And we need that He should come to make us blessed. Joys here are no more lasting than they are complete. As one who only too sadly proved the truth of his own words, burning out his life before he was six-and-thirty, has said
And, on the other hand, 'these things have I spoken unto you that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. It is not 'for seven days' that we 'keep the feast' if God has 'made us joyful, but for all the rest of the days of time, and for the endless years of the calm gladnesses of the heavens.
IV. AFTER A DECLARATION OF CONSENT, PLEDGES ARE TO BE GIVEN. By pledges we mean presents, which, after consent, are confirmations, testifications, first favors, and gladnesses.
Self- sacrifice at the bidding of Jesus Christ is the recipe for the highest, the most exquisite, the most godlike gladnesses of which the human heart is capable. Our joy will remain if His joy is ours.
So, brethren! remember that the richest vintages are grown on the rough slopes of the volcano, and lovely flowers blow at the glacier's edge; and all our troubles, big and little, may be converted into gladnesses if we accept them as God meant them. Only they must be so accepted if they are to be thus changed.
And what effect will be adequate as the outcome of such a cause as 'the riches of His glory'? Nothing short of absolute perfectness, the full transmutation of our dark, cold being into the reflected image of His own burning brightness, the ceaseless replenishing of our own spirits with all graces and gladnesses akin to His, the eternal growth of the soul upward and Godward.
I think if we take this simple saying we get two or three thoughts, not altogether irrelevant to universal experience, about the true and the counterfeit gladnesses possible to us all. I. Look at that great and wonderful thought God the joy-maker.
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