principles of our nature, are, in consequence of human depravity, productive of evil as well as of good. Their gratification, in the pursuit and attainment of power and reputation, is doubtless accompanied with pleasure; and this pleasure is enjoyed in connexion with the superiority which rank and fortune confer; but much more purely and intensely from the nobler superiority of intellectual strength and endowment; the force and vigour of the understanding; the variety and extent of knowledge; and the arts of persuasion and oratory. We naturally desire the esteem of others, and consequently a good reputation, from the pleasure we enjoy in its possession; and minds of a high and generous order are peculiarly susceptible of this pleasurable emotion. To possess the esteem and confidence of any of the wise and good of mankind, is one of the greatest earthly blessings, and which will be undervalued and disregarded by none but those who feel, that they cannot acquire them, because they do not deserve them. "A good name is better, more fragrant and refreshing, than precious ointment."

But the slightest consideration may satisfy us that even pleasures of this nature are liable to be interrupted by causes over which man has no control; and that he who pursues them as an ultimate end, and as forming his real and chief good, must experience severe disappointments, and have his happiness proportionably impaired. In this case the passion formed is a worldly ambition, the most powerful as well as the most restless and tormenting of all the principles that influence the human heart. When it has the entire

possession, it holds an uncontrolled dominion; but a dominion which is productive of unceasing anxiety and disquietude. Of all the discarded statesmen, it has been said, who for their own ease have studied to get the better of ambition, and to despise those honours which they could no longer arrive at, how few have been able to succeed! The greater part have spent their time in the most listless and insipid indolence, chagrined, at the thoughts of their own insignificance, incapable of being interested in the occupations of private life, without enjoyment, except when they talked of their former greatness, and without satisfaction, except when they were employed in some vain project to recover it.-Of the millions who have toiled for posthumous fame, how few of even their names have been rescued from oblivion; every vestige of themselves and of their works has been swept away by the tide of time, and the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, and their hatred, and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion in any thing that is done under the

sun.

Can pleasures such as these, so liable to interruption, so fleeting in duration, and bearing often along with them sources of pain and disquietude, constitute the happiness of man?-Neither can this happiness proceed,

V. From the command and the use of riches. They were also included in the experiments of Solomon in his pursuit of the chief good. Wealth flowed to his treasury from many tributary states; and all the gratifications which it could purchase he freely enjoyed :

yet he has pronounced them to be unsatisfactory and empty, utterly inadequate to the happiness of man. "He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity. When goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what good is there to the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with their eyes?-As he came forth of his mother's womb, naked shall he return to go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labour, which he may carry away in his hand."

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It was not the design of Solomon to deny that wealth procures many things in themselves desirable, and that, therefore, it ought not to be contemned. He allows that it contributes to our comfort and usefulness, and consequently to our happiness. Money," says he, "answereth all things." It gives to the man who possesses it, what is far more valuable than personal conveniences, the power of doing good,-of widely diffusing the beneficence of God. But it is so far from being capable of constituting the true happiness of man, that its increase is generally productive of disquietude and trouble. Both it and the enjoyments which it purchases are transitory; they cannot, even when at their height, make their possessor supremely happy; they cannot sooth his spirit when wounded by calumny and reproach; they cannot mitigate the pains of disease; nor can they for a moment arrest the approach of death.

These different sources of human enjoyment which I have enumerated, though in their respective value and importance differing widely from each other, are

from their very nature incapable of constituting the true happiness of fallen and immortal man. They are in themselves fleeting and shortlived; the capacity of deriving any share of delight from them decays with the decay of life; and even when this capacity is unimpaired, one such view of the holiness and perfections of the eternal God as would allow the light of truth to strike upon the conscience, would in a moment dissolve the charm, and convert into wormwood and gall the streams of earthly enjoyment.

How often does the light of the Gospel, shining suddenly on the heart and conscience, produce this effect, awakening as if from a dream the man of gaiety and unconcern, who had lived without God, and kindling into the most painful remorse the feelings of fear and shame with which he is overwhelmed! His eyes are opened to behold the real character of the God in whom he lives and moves,-to see him confronting him in the just authority of that government whose acts he has hitherto unheeded, and in the spirituality of a law, which, though holy, just, and good, he has totally disobeyed. The light which thus breaks in upon the mind, partakes of the omnipotency of the blessed object which it brings to view. It dissolves the charm which had knit the soul to the idols that had usurped dominion over it; and as if all that gave them interest were in a moment annihilated, it sees the entire nothingness of all the grandeur and honour of the world, and all the pleasures and the treasures of a momentary duration. To which of the springs of inferior enjoyment, at which alone he has hitherto drank, can he go to obtain peace-can he go to pro

cure the oblivious draught that will remove from his memory what it is misery not to forget, and to save him from the fearful looking-for of judgment which it is still greater misery to anticipate? Has he not yet around him all the sources of happiness, with which, till now, he had been satisfied, to the exclusion of every other; all the wisdom, perhaps, of the profoundest philosophy; all the abundance that had ministered to his enjoyment; all the objects of affection that had called into exercise his benevolent and social feelings; all the fair reputation which the suffrages of his fellow-creatures had willingly given him; all the pleasures arising from the active pursuit of objects, from amusement, and from friendly intercourse; and all the enjoyment which the varying combinations of taste and of fancy can communicate? He has them all; and yet he is miserable, most miserable. He is miserable while he sees nothing in himself corresponding to the moral likeness of God: nothing that can be pleasing to him who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity; nothing that can meet the entire approbation of His law, when that law receives its right interpretation; nothing to render him meet for dwelling, either on earth or in heaven, in the fellowship of God from whose presence he cannot flee. He feels the bitterness of a wounded spirit, which the attempts of human skill cannot avail to remove. And with an

anxiety to which he had been till now a stranger, and which, perhaps, there is nothing in his outward circumstances more likely than before to produce, he asks what he must do to be saved.

If, indeed, the light of the Gospel had not shone on