the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."

He who formed us made us susceptible of receiving pleasure through the medium of the senses; and to heighten this pleasure, he placed the parents of our race in a paradise where all was beauty to the eye, and music to the ear. The pleasures of this kind, though of an inferior nature, and possessed by us in common with the lower animals, serve as occasional refreshments, when disengaged from higher pursuits, and are illustrative of the goodness of God, who has endowed us with so many and such various capacities of enjoyment. But to allow these in a single instance to detain us from the pursuit of religious and moral excel. lence, or to occupy the place of the high and enduring happiness of man, would be what the royal preacher has denominated madness and folly. Sensual grati fications are in all cases but of short continuance, and those who make them the professed object of their pursuit, and who are restrained by no considerations of fortune or of conscience, are far from being happy. We observe in them a restless and inextinguishable passion for variety: a great part of their time is necessarily vacant, and therefore irksome; and with whatever eagerness and expectation they set out, they become fastidious in their choice, languid in their powers of enjoyment, and yet miserable when their pleasure is wanting. "There is a limit at which pleasures of this nature soon arrive, and from which they ever afterwards decline; and if it is attempted to

compensate for this imperfection by a frequency of repetition, diminution of sensibility, and utter exhaustion of the faculties are the consequence." Who can be conceived more truly degraded and wretched than the voluptuary, who in consequence of the loss of opportunities and the decay of nature, is tormented by desires that can never be gratified, and by the memory of pleasures that can never return?

These considerations, apart from revelation, may teach us, that we consult our real good only when we indulge in such pleasures with great moderation; when we use them according to the designs of the Creator, as accessaries to our enjoyment, and in entire subordination to the great end of our being; and that we should look to other and to higher objects for our true and permanent happiness.

IV. Neither does the abiding happiness of man consist in the possession of honour and fame. This was a source of enjoyment which Solomon amply possessed: for he was wiser than all men; and his fame was in all nations round about. Yet it is of this he says, "As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten."

The love of power, honour, and fame, is resolvable into the desires of superiority and esteem: desires, which because they were originally planted in the human heart, are in a greater or less degree universally operative: but which, like all the other active

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 enjoy. ments 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