this great thirst of happiness - yet our Saviour, who knew the world, though he enjoyed but little of it, tells us, that whosoever drinketh of this water will thirst again :—and we all find by experience it is so, and by reason that it always must be so.

I conclude with a short observation upon Solomon's evidence in this case.

Never did the busy brain of a lean and hectic chemist search for the philosopher's stone with more pains and ardour than this great man did after happiness. He was one of the wisest inquirers into Nature - had tried all her powers and capacities, and after a thousand vain speculations and vile experiments, he affirmed at length, it lay hid in no one thing he had tried; like the chemist's projections, all had ended in smoke, or what was worse, in vanity and vexation of spirit: the conclusion of the whole matter was this—that he advises every man who would be happy, to fear God and keep his commandments.

SERMON II

THE HOUSE OF FEASTING AND THE HOUSE OF MOURNING DESCRIBED

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting.-ECCLESIASTES Vii. 2, 3.

HAT I deny-but let us hear the wise man's reasoning upon it—for that is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to his heart: sorrow is better than laughter -for a crack-brain'd order of Carthusian monks, I grant, but not for men of the world: For what purpose, do you imagine, has God made us? for the social sweets of the well-watered valleys, where he has planted us, or for the dry and dismal desert of a Sierra Morena? Are the sad accidents of life, and the uncheery hours which perpetually overtake us, are they not enough, but we must sally forth in quest of them, belie our own hearts, and say as our text would have us, that they are better than those of joy? did the Best of Beings send us into the world for this end-to go weeping

through it, to vex and shorten a life short and vexatious enough already? do you think, my good preacher, that he who is infinitely happy, can envy us our enjoyments? or that a Being so infinitely kind would grudge a mournful traveller the short rest and refreshments necessary to support his spirits through the stages of a weary pilgrimage? or that he would call him to a severe reckoning, because in his way he had hastily snatched at some little fugacious pleasures, merely to sweeten this uneasy journey of life, and reconcile him to the ruggedness of the road, and the many hard jostlings he is sure to meet with? Consider, I beseech you, what provision and accommodation the Author of our being has prepared for us, that we might not go on our way sorrowing-how many caravanseras of rest-what powers and faculties he has given us for taking it-what apt objects he has placed in our way to entertain us;-some of which he has made so fair, so exquisitely fitted for this end, that they have power over us for a time to charm away the sense of pain, to cheer up the dejected heart under poverty and sickness, and make it go and remember its miseries no

more.

I will not contend at present against this rhetoric; I would choose rather for a moment to go on with the allegory, and say we are travellers, and, in the most affecting sense of that idea, that like travellers, though upon business of the last and nearest concern to us, we may surely be allowed to amuse ourselves with the natural or artificial beauties of the country we are passing through, without reproach of forgetting the main errand we are sent upon; and if we can so order it, as not to be led out of the way, by the variety of prospects, edifices, and ruins which solicit us, it would be a nonsensical piece of saint-errantry, to shut our eyes.

But let us not lose sight of the argument in pursuit of the simile.

Let us remember, various as our excursions are that we have still set our faces towards Jerusalem that we have a place of rest and happiness, towards which we hasten, and that the way to get there is not so much to please our hearts, as to improve them in virtue; that mirth and feasting are usually no friends to achievements of this kind but that a season of affliction is in some sort a season of piety - not only because our sufferings are apt