I have been young and now I am old, and I bear my testimony that I have never found thorough, pervading, enduring morality with any but such as feared God, not in the modern sense, but in the old childlike way. And only with such, too, have I found a rejoicing in life, a hearty, victorious cheerfulness of so distinguished a kind, that no other is to be compared with it.

Jacobi, translated by Hedge.

"You destroy the divine image in your soul by sadness," says the holy Capuchin friar Lombez. "God is joy. All nature rejoices in its Creator, and would you remain in a sad silence? It is joy which makes the heart fear God."

St. Gregory reckons sadness, "the sadness of the world, worldly sorrow among the seven capital sins.

"Sadness proceedeth from self-love; and joy from the love of God." So we read in the Meditations for the English College, at Lisbon.

What means the Church in bidding the priest to bear in mind the sighs of youth? It is that she has deeply observed nature; for in youth, the most joyous season of life, men “are sad as night, only from wantonness." As if they who were most capable of enjoying the rich banquet of life, found a pleasure all the while, in knowing that, even on such an earth as this, they are in a world of woe. Ages of Faith.

Many Christians do greatly wrong themselves with a

dull and heavy kind of sullenness; who, not suffering themselves to delight in any worldly thing, are thereupon ofttimes so heartless, that they delight in nothing.

Bishop Hall.

Were we to strip our sufferings of all the aggravations which our overbusy imaginations heap upon them, of all that our impatience and wilfulness embitters in them, of all that a morbid craving for sympathy induces us to display to others, they would shrink to less than half their bulk; and what remained would be comparatively easy to support. Guesses at Truth.

It is one main point of happiness that he that is happy doth know and judge himself to be so. The knowledge and consideration of it is the fruition of it.

Coleridge.

The good Angels are so filled with their present happiness, they are so quieted with the enjoyment of God himself, that they are not at all solicitous, or inquisitive about future events, but they cheerfully entertain and drink in all those beams that come flowing from the face of their God, and they desire no more than he is pleased to communicate to them; nay, indeed, they can desire no more, for he gives them as much as they are capable of.

But how fain the sons of men would have some key or other to unlock and open these secret and reserved passages, which Providence hath wisely shut up and hid from the eyes of men. They have no satisfaction, no Sabbath,

no quiet in their present state, and therefore they would fain know what the next day and the next year, and the next age will bring forth. The desires, the prayers, the hopes, the endeavors, the counsels of men, they all look toward the future. God will have men in this sense in diem vivere, to entertain fortune by the day.

Nathaniel Culverwel.

In bearing misfortune and vexation, as in overcoming temptation, there is a certain confidence which had better be put aside. This confidence sometimes results from a faith in reason, or rather a faith in our being exactly amenable to reason. For instance, it is some time before a man ceases to have a full belief in his own powers of accomplishing, by direct means, the absolute rule in his mind. If he is convinced of a thing, he says to himself, of course he will act accordingly. It astonishes him to hear of men - great men who could not overcome, or found the greatest difficulty in overcoming, some small habit. Indeed, according to his brave imaginings, he intends always to overcome terrors and temptations, not merely to avoid them. Such is a very juvenile, though a very natural, mode of thinking. It requires a good many fallings in the mire, before a man finds that his own mind, temperament, and faculties, are things which will give him as much or more trouble to manage than his affairs, or his family, or than the whole family besides.

One great art in managing small anxieties, is to cease thinking about them just at that point where thought

becomes morbid. It will not do to say that such anxieties may not demand some thought, and occasionally, much thought. But there comes a time when thought is wasted upon these anxieties; when you find yourself in your thoughts, going over the same ground again and again to no purpose, deepening annoyance instead of enlarging insight and providing remedy. Then the thing would be to be able to speak to these fretting little cares, like Lord Burleigh to his gown of State, when he took it off for the night, "Lie there, Lord Treasurer."

There is often a very keen annoyance suffered by highminded and sensitive people, arising from dissatisfaction with their own work. I should be very sorry to say any thing that would seem like encouragement to slight or unconscientious working, but to the anxious, truthseeking, high-minded, fastidious man, I would sometimes. venture to say, "my good friend, if we could work out our ideal, we should be angels. There is eternity to do it in. But now, come down from your pedestal, and do not overfret yourself, because your hand, or your mind, or your soul, will not fulfil all that you would have it."

There is another form of unhappiness which is not uncommon, and which often occurs in the midst of a great seeming prosperity, which deepens the vexation, and gives an air of especial mockery to it. It is where an almost infinite regret enters the mind at some happiness having been missed, which in imagination seems the one, possible, present good to the person indulging the imagination; and the men or women in this sad case, go on all their

days mourning or fretting for want of that imagined felicity.

To find consolation for this state of mind may not be easy; still, even for this there are medicaments. Imagine the happiness in question gained, fond dreamer; do you not already see some diminution of it; do you not at least perceive how many fears such happiness would throw you open to?

How much, by the way, accomplishments of various kinds would come in to help men to get rid of over-riding small cares and petty anxieties. These accomplishments mostly appeal to another world of thought and feeling than that in which the little troubles were bred. The studious, the busy, and the sorrowful, might find in art a change of thought which nothing else, at least of worldly things, could give them. And the accomplishments I

mean would be of use on occasions when there is no need, and where it is scarcely fitting to summon forth the solemn aid of religion or philosophy. Not that I would have such aid far distant from any mind, or on any occasion; for there is a comfort and a sobriety of mind to be gained from the great topics of consolation, which nothing else can surely give. Helps.

The first object of this essay is to suggest some antidotes against the manifold ingenuity of self-tormenting.

For instance, how much fretting might be prevented by a thorough conviction that there can be no such thing as unmixed good in this world! In ignorance of this, how