"....the key-word of the Old Testament from beginning to end is the word "joy.' "

Again, one may ask, why should Hebraism be regarded as the expression of a dark self-effacement; why should the Hebrews be regarded as a gloomy people? They danced openly with delight in the goodness of God; the key-word of the Old Testament from beginning to end is the word "joy." Their sacred books blaze with gold and jewels just as they blaze with elemental gratitude and pleasure. They believe, more openly and professedly than any people has believed, in the primal fertilities, in the fact that the corn and the orchard are the signals of the ultimate beneficence, in the fact that children and the fruit of the womb are a heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord. They declared that God called all things good, the most stupendously daring thing that any people has ever said. Yet they said one thing more daring still; they said that all things called God good, that the blessing of the Seventh Day was hurled back again upon the Giver, that all created things praised the Lord. If this be the situation, it is at least striking. God declares that the leper is good, and the leper praises God in reply. It would cause no astonishment if such a people was accused of extravagant optimism, of grotesque exuberance, of hysterical hilarity. But that they should be accused of being sombre, and allowing no place for exhilaration, is perhaps one of the darkest and most ancient riddles of human stupidity. It is absolutely and genuinely, for all intellectual purposes, like accusing the French of a slow and heavy materialism, or the Vikings of an over-subtle aestheticism.

-December 28, 1901, The Speaker