Now, it is profitable to consider that the same thoughts which we have of them, others will ere long have concerning us.  What would make us satisfied and happy to know respecting them?  What are we glad to say of their preparation for an eternal state?  What would we have had that preparation be?  In what respects better or different?  Where do we love to assign them their places?  And what is it pleasant to believe are their thoughts of us, of earth, of eternity, of the gospel, of this life as a season of preparation for heaven?  We shall soon be the subjects of the same contemplations in the minds of others.  The hosts of that long procession, of which we are the part now passing over the stage, are urging and pressing us from behind, and we must go down, as others have before us,—­our love, our envy, our hatred perish,—­and we no more have any portion in all that is done under the sun.

We must give up happiness as the great aim and end of existence, and, instead of it, take this for our supreme endeavor and chief end—­the conscientious performance of our duty to God, and to others.  We are never really happy till we cease to expect happiness from the things of this world.  As soon as we begin to be satisfied with God, and find that to think of God, to love him, to trust in him, to serve him, is happiness enough, we attain to solid peace; and then, turning and following the sun, all desirable pleasure pursues us and solicits us, like our shadows, the more eagerly and steadily the more that we flee from them, and the less that we turn ourselves to them.  We never can be happy by searching for happiness; but when we give up this search, and duty becomes the motto of life, we are inevitably happy.  God must satisfy us—­his personal love to us, communion with him, the contemplation of his character, ways, and works; in short, the consciousness of having him for a personal friend, disclosing all our thoughts to him, looking to him and waiting for him in all things, and, as the Bible expresses it, “walking” with him.  Then he makes our wants his care; and while he leads us through strange paths which we should not have chosen, it is to bring us, at the last, into a condition which will make us happy chiefly from the reflection that God himself appointed it.  Disappointments, of which we were forewarned, and which we had every reason to expect, embitter that life whose only sources of happiness are confined to this world, and do not relate to God.  Making him the supreme source of our happiness, we give up undue sorrow for departed friends, feeling that they are removed from all need of our commiseration, and all power to afford us comfort and help, any further than their example and remembered words instruct us.  We shall then be chiefly concerned to know and to do the will of God, to watch over the interests of our souls, preparing for life, with its important duties, and storing up those recollections which are to occupy our thoughts in the review of life beyond the grave.