build our happinefs on a firm and durable foundation. No, even unfuccefsful attempts and pursuits, even frustrated plans and defignis, even unaccomplifhed wifhes and ungratified defires may well confift with human happinefs. By that means many greater and more continued evils and pains, injuries and deceptions are removed or averted from us. By that means we are exercised in the ufe and application of our faculties in the most diverfified manner, and they acquire a more direct and fettled application. By that means our reason is ever gaining a completer mastery and authority over our fenfuality, and at every ftep by which we approach towards perfection we at the fame time approach towards happiness. By that means in short we learn better to understand the object we are in pursuit of and the way that leads to it, and more circumfpectly and cautiously to walk that way.

Hence it follows, that human happiness cannot confift in a state of purely agreeable ideas and fenfations, much lefs in the enjoyment of merely rapturous delight and fively pleasure. Both the one and the other would be manifeftly at variance with our nature, and with the nature of the other things that furround us and with which we are in connection. A body, formed of duft, deftructible in its nature, which is fo liable to injury, to harm, to diffolution; a place of abode that is fubject to fo many alterations and viciffitudes, on which all is unftable, all as it were in a perpetual ebb and flow;

a mind that with regard to perceptions and faculties is fo limited, which so often mistakes and errs, and whofe operations depend in fo many refpects on that earthly and frail body; a life that has such a variety of wants and imposes on us fo many duties which we cannot adequately perform without great pains and toil; a fociety of perfons, in fhort, who are as limited, as weak and frail as ourfelves: all this renders it utterly impoffible that we could have none but agreeable ideas and fenfations, or could endure a state of uninterrupted, continual, extatic pleasure, if it were even poffible. We ourfelves and all the objects that furround us must be quite otherwise conftituted: we must not be men, the place of our abode must not be the earth, our goods and poffeffions must not be tranfitory, our perceptions and faculties must be far greater and more independent, for rendering fuch a ftate conceivable. And whoever should think that to be human happinefs and run after it, would deceive himself, and pursue a fantom which he could never grasp.

No, my pious hearers, human happiness, sum marily to recapitulate what has been faid, human happiness depends rather on what we ourselves are, what we think, feel and will, than on what is without us, or what we poffefs of outward endowments and privileges: it depends rather on the use and the application of our faculties themfelves and on the method in which we use and apply them, than on those things that we attempt and achieve by

them:

them and it confifts in the preponderance of our agreeable ideas and fenfations over the dif agreeable. If order and tranquillity prevail within us, in our fentiments and feelings, in our appetites and affections, no kind of disorder and diffention from without can make us really unhappy, though they may diminish and difturb our pleasure if by the application of our faculties we exercife and expand them, and do fo with consciousness and confideration, we feel that we are thus becoming more intelligent, more expert, more perfect, that we are proceeding from one step of culture to another, and this fentiment must procure us delight, even when we do not produce the alterations without us, to the production whereof we applied our faculties in each particular cafe: if in fhort we experience and enjoy more good than evil; are oftener able than unable to employ our faculties; find more opportunities and means than obftacles and oppofition to our improvement and perfection; and have more causes for being fatisfied than diffatisfied with ourselves and our condition, then our agree. able ideas and fenfations thus gain the preponde rance over the difagreeable, and the more remarkable this preponderance is, so much the greater and more complete is the human happiness as it can be here on earth enjoyed. As various and different as the fum and the vivacity and ftrength of agreeable and difagreeable ideas and fenfations are in human fouls; fo various and different are also the degrecs

degrees of happiness which they enjoy. Perfectly pure and unalloyed happiness is peculiar to the most perfect mind alone. The greater the distance of any kind and clafs of beings from this fupreme perfection; fo much the greater is alfo the mixture of the good and the evil, the agreeable and the dif agreeable in their condition and in the ideas and fenfations which they have. Human happiness is therefore not outward profperity, not the accomplishment of all our wishes and defigns, not the uninterrupted enjoyment of pleasure and delight, but a state that procures us more fatisfaction than diffatisfaction, more pleasure than difcomfort, more agreeable than difagreeable ideas and fenfations.

And how arifes, whereon is grounded this preponderance of the good over the evil, the agreeable over the difagreeable in human fouls? On what therefore refts their happiness? It is grounded and it refts on wifdom, on virtue, on piety. These, my dear friends, are the three principal and most abundant fources of human happiness. Let us approach thefe fources, more circumftantially obferve their falutary efficacies, and fee in what connection they ftand with our happinefs and what influence they have upon it.

The first fource, the first ground of human hap piness is wisdom: the right ufe of the understanding and the proper application of it to all the occurrences, bufineffes, privileges and endowments, joys and forrows of this life. This wisdom teaches us

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to judge of the objects that surround us, with which we are in connection, which we enjoy or forego, which we pursue or do not purfue, and to esteem or defpife, to love and feek or to abhor and avoid them, proportionably to their value, their deftination, their habitudes and relations to us and others, and the whole to which both they and we belong. It teaches us to diftinguish appearance from reality, form from substance, momentary plea fure from permanent fatisfaction, tranfient often falutary pain from actual mifery, the means from the end, poffeffion from enjoyment and use; it teaches us to take every object for what it really is, for as difpenfable or as indifpenfable, for as tranfitory and fugacious, or for as untranfitory and permanent, for as important and great, for as infignificant and small, for as covetable or for as indifferent, as, in regard to its real nature and quality and the whole scope of its confequences and effects, it is. And if we learn this, what an influence must it have on our happiness How very much muft it facilitate and fmooth for us the path to its fanctuary? How much feldomer fhould we be deceived in our expectations! How much feldomer exert our faculties in vain and fail of our defigns! How much feldomer be furprised, or impatiently grieve at what happens to ourselves and to others! How much more easily dispense with what has only the fpecious appearance of good, and endure what has only the outward form or is only the first advertisement