ABSTRACT
To the Christian, despair is a sin, not because there is anything to be hoped for in this life, but because to despair is to lack faith in redemption from it in the life everlasting. And success, happiness, or at least freedom from anxiety, is also the burden of popular religion, as unchristian in these, its aims, as it is in its means. The happiness felt in disparate groups, in disparate periods and places cannot be measured and compared. Even in examining a single life it seems absurd to throw ont o the same scale the separate raptures generated by hearing chamber music, eating a peach, loving, or winning a fight; harder still to measure the depth of despair into which one sinks if he fails or suffers positive sorrows. Individual personalities cannot be mass-produced with happiness thrown in or money back.
