We all crave happiness. Happiness is an end of life which is worthy of effort, but it is an end which must be subordinated to another end if it is to be pursued successfully; and this other end is service. But service means sacrifice; apparently the opposite of happiness. We reach this paradox then: Happiness is a worthy end of our efforts; but if we place it before ourselves as the direct and immediate end to be striven for, we cannot reach it. It will elude us.

Individual lives repeat the race-history. If you would attain to happiness seek something else. Poets, philosophers, and prophets, all tell us this, for to all it comes as the result of the deepest insight and the ripest experience. But all go further. You must cast aside the thought of happiness as a chief aim. You may not keep it concealed in a corner of your mind and heart as after all the main thing, but a thing to be reached in a round-about-way. You cannot successfully juggle with yourself. You must in very truth renounce yourself to find yourself, and give up yourself to save yourself.

John Stuart Mill discovered that, “Those only are happy who have their mind fixed on some object other than their own happiness; as, the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else they find happiness by the way.”

We have in these words of Mill a partial statement, at least, of the great ethical law of indirectness. We reach ethical ends only indirectly. Resolving to be good will in itself never make us good.

But shall we heap paradox on paradox? We have already found that while the craving for happiness is natural and the desire for happiness is legitimate, we shall lose it if we seek it. We have discovered that the secret of life is renunciation. We must sacrifice our life to receive it in fullness. “Surely, then, self-sacrifice is an end,” we may be told. By no means. Self-sacrifice in itself is no virtue and may not be made an end in itself. Self-sacrifice pursued as an end leads to a gloomy asceticism which would have us refuse the joy of life as something bad and hateful to the Giver of all good things. Self-sacrifice bears its fruit of peace and happiness and life only when it is pursued indirectly.

Have we not seen this in those who have found the secret of life? Have we not noticed how those whose life is wholly given to others–perhaps in some far-away land, deprived of almost everything which we hold dear–speak of their privileges? Have we never heard a noble woman, wholly given to good works in a dreary slum of a great city, and who in the opinion of a host of admiring friends is almost ready for canonization, resent the thought that her life was one of self-sacrifice? Undoubtedly. And there is one word that gives the key to these paradoxes. What is it? We know what it is: Love–love, the secret of the universe. Sacrifice is not an end in itself, but sacrifice is the condition of service. The law of society is service. This is the supreme law of society from which no one can escape with impunity. ociety.