you I believe it to be a public duty to warn people against cheats, quacks, and impostors. J.C. Ryle, Happiness, 1878.

Happiness is what all mankind want to obtain. The desire for it is deeply planted in the human heart. All men naturally dislike pain, sorrow, and discomfort. All men naturally like ease, comfort, and gladness. All men naturally hunger and thirst after happiness. As the sick man longs for health, so does poor mortal man long to be happy.

But alas, how few consider what they really mean when they talk of happiness. How vague and indistinct and undefined are the ideas of most people upon the subject. They think some are happy, who in reality are miserable. They think some are gloomy and sad, who in reality are truly happy. They dream of a happiness which in reality would never satisfy their nature's needs.

I want to expose some common mistakes about the way to be happy. There are several roads which are thought by many to lead to happiness. In each of these roads tens of thousands of men and women are continually travelling. Each imagine that if they could only attain all that they want, that they would be happy, and all alike seem ignorant that they are hunting shadows.

I will mention by name some of the principal delusions about happiness. I do it in love and charity and compassion to men's souls. I believe it to be a public duty to warn people against cheats, quacks, and impostors. Oh, how much trouble and sorrow it might save my readers if they would only believe what I am going to say.

It is an utter mistake to suppose that pleasure-seeking and amusements alone can give happiness. Of all roads that men can take in order to be happy, this is the one that is most completely wrong. of all wary, flat, dull, and unprofitable ways of spending life, this succeeds all, to think of a sinful, dying creature, with an immortal soul, expecting happiness, in feasting and reveling, in dancing and singing, in dressing and visiting, in ball-going and card-playing, in races and fairs, in hunting and shooting, in crowds, in laughter, in noise, in music, in wine,

Surely it is a sight that is enough to make the devil laugh and the angels weep. Even a child will not play with its toys all day long, but when grown-up men and women think to find happiness in a constant round of amusement, they sink far below a child.

True happiness does not consist in laughter and smiles. The face is very often a poor index of the heart. There are thousands who laugh loud and are merry in company, but are wretched and miserable in private. On the other hand, there are hundreds who are grave and serious in their demeanour, whose hearts are full of solid peace,

Smiles are worth but little. A man may smile and smile and be a villain. The eternal Word of God teaches us that even in laughter, the heart may be sorrowful. Proverbs 14, 13. Tell me not merely of smiling and laughing faces. I want to hear of something more than that when I ask whether a man is happy.

A truly happy man, no doubt, will often show his happiness in his countenance. but a man may have a very merry face, and yet not be happy at all. Of all deceptive things on earth, nothing is so deceptive as mere worldly gaiety and merriment. It is a hollow, empty show, utterly devoid of substance and reality.

Listen to the brilliant talker in society, follow him to his own private room, and you will very likely find him plunged in melancholy despondency." Colonel Gardiner confessed that even when he was thought most happy, he often wished he was a dog. Look at the smiling beauty in the ballroom, and you might suppose that she knew not what it was to be unhappy. See her next day at her own home, and you may probably find her out of temper with herself and everybody else besides.

" Oh no, worldly merriment is not real happiness. There is a certain pleasure about it, I do not deny. There is an animal excitement about it, I make no question. There is a temporary elevation of spirits about it, I freely concede. But do not call it by the sacred name of happiness. When glass is called diamond, and tinsel is called gold, then, and not until then, those people who can laugh and revel will deserve to be called happy people.