Mad

"The world is full of Christian ideas gone mad," G. K. Chesterton once observed. It is worth thinking of modern happiness as one of those ideas. The heir to not only the metaphysics of the classical world but to the promise of Christian salvation, happiness received Christianity's legacy of universal hope, charging it with a powerful democratic potential and missionary appeal.

Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History
(NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 265