> I have an acquaintance who is a devoted pentecostal Christian. To all
> appearances, she's one of the happiest people I've ever known. She
> also seems quite kind-hearted and genuine. I appreciate her faith,
> though I could never embrace it.
>
> She reminds me of that passage in William James's "Varieties of
> Religious Experience":
>
> "In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic
> emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom.
> I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who,
> when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to
> feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons
> in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the
> goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition,
> and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may he born.
> From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine....
>
> "It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often ...