nds, sweeter hearts, a nobler and profounder peace than
those of magnificent surroundings. The disposition to make the best of
life is what we want to make us happy. Those who are so willful and
seemingly perverse about their outward circumstances, are often
intensely affected by the merest trifles. A little thing shadows their
life for days. The want of some little convenience, some personal
gratification, some outward form or ornament, will blight a day's joy.
They can often bear a great calamity better than a small disappointment,
because they nerve themselves to meet the former, and yield to the
latter without an effort to resist. Mole-hills are magnified into
mountains, and in the shadow of these mountains they sit down and weep.
The very things they ought to have sometimes come unasked, and because
they are not ready for them, they will not enjoy them, but rather make
them the causes of misery. There is a disposition also in such minds to
multiply their troubles as well as magnify them. They make troubles of
many things which should really be regarded as privileges, opportunities
for self-sacrifice, for culture, for improving effort. They make
troubles of the ordinary allotments of life, its duties, charities,
changes, unavoidable accidents, reverses, and experiences. All this can
be considered in no other light than morally wrong, for these common
allotments and experiences were beyond all question ordained by Infinite
Wisdom as a most healthy discipline for both the body and mind of man.
All such complaining is ingratitude, practical impiety.

Nearly all people have their secret repinings, their unexpressed
disquietude, because things are not as they would have them; because
they do not possess some fancied good, or do experience some fancied
misfortune. There is a tendency in all our minds to such inward
murmurings. And this is wrong, and when we indulge in it, it is wicked.
We ought not to make idols of our plans. We ought not to have too great
attachments to our own ideas of what we must have, to be happy. If we
do, we shall be very miserable, while we believe we are very good. The
trouble is, we are too selfish, too unyielding in our arrangements for
life's best good. Because we can not find Happiness in our own way, we
will not accept it in any way, and so make ourselves miserable. I have
known many very excellent people very unhappy from a kind of stubborn
adherence to their settled convictions of just what