In an age like ours, when feeling predominates over thought, the title of this article will strike a very bizarre note. And yet the fact that joy can be experienced without the grosser exhilaration of the senses is a truth witnessed to by the saints in every age. The Kingdom of God in the soul is a foretaste of the joys of heaven, and if the separated soul can experience the beatific joy of gazing with unclouded vision on its God, then surely it will be able in some measure to exercise a royal independence for tasting the divine delights even in this life. Joy is an experience which normally causes the whole man to- vibrate, but although “cabin’d, cribb'd, confined” through its companionship with the body, there seems no adequate reason why the immaterial soul divinized by the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity should not be able at times to vibrate with a joy that is wholly spiritual. If the faculties of the soul shot through with the divine splendour could not occasionally breathe the more rarified atmosphere of the supernatural without the cacophony of the senses, its deeply embedded hopes of immortality would lose their tonic effect, and we should soon begin to wilt under the weight of our material surroundings.

The stammerings of the mystics point to an experience which escapes the power of rational analysis. They describe darkness in terms of light, and their growing contentment would seem to keep pace with an ever-deepening conviction of the incomprehensibility of God.