Читать книгу A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies - Mrs. (Anna) Jameson - Страница 15

Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God’s blessed sunshine—Tristi fummo nel’ aer dolce; and in some of the ancient Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue.

Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and goodness to consist in “a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfaction.”

What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant head of Christ in Raphael’s Transfiguration should rather be our ideal of Him who came “to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”