MANY people in the world consider joy a transient thing, so rare and fleeting that to experience it occasionally is cause for wonder and gratitude. The student of Christian Science knows that true joy is not transient but is an essential and permanent quality of the real man. Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 76), "The sinless joy,—the perfect harmony and immortality of Life, possessing unlimited divine beauty and goodness without a single bodily pleasure or pain,—constitutes the only veritable, indestructible man, whose being is spiritual."
Joy is native to man and basic to his very being. Without it man cannot fully express his God-given nature. Joy is a continuous condition of Spirit, a ceaseless attribute of Soul, which man reflects.
The notion of a joyless man is a mesmeric, darkened, hypnotic state of thought, an argument of the carnal, or mortal, mind. Mortal mind, which never creates or accomplishes but merely suggests, must finally yield to the divine Mind, which maintains man as he really is, changeless and perfect. But our vision of man's true eternal being must be kept bright and burnished so that we may see that it is our own real nature and that no less worthy nature can be attached to us.
