You do not need to be reminded of the importance of this subject. Do we not hear on all sides that happiness is what all the world is seeking? Why are men toiling and struggling and warring with each other to heap up wealth except that they believe it will bring happiness? It is probably true that most of the actions of the majority of human beings are directed, consciously or unconsciously, toward happiness as an end. “We keep pleasure in the background of our minds, not allowing it to be seen, yet always hoping for more and more of it,” says one of our modern writers on ethics. Yet I should be sorry to have you believe that pleasure is the summum bonum of life.

All normal, healthy young people are happy. There may be disappointments and sorrows, but the power of rebound is great and happiness returns. The Creator evidently wants us to be happy, and any other theory of life is an unnatural one. The ascetics of the Middle Ages had a mistaken idea of serving God, believing that the more they suffered, the better they were pleasing Him. Our conception of God as a God of love forbids that theory. In children and animals happiness is always a sign of well-being, as it seems to denote absence of ill-adjustment. If a young child appears to be happy, we feel that all is well with it. The frolicsome play of all young creatures is an expression of the gladness that has been implanted within them. The further removed we are from the spirit of gladness, the less are we conforming to one of the deepest laws of our being.

Happiness is good, not only as a sign that all is well with us, just as silence in the machine denotes perfect adjustment, but it is good as productive of something beyond itself. If we are happy, we work better. Happiness has an exhilarating effect. If we are happy, we add to the joy of all about us and thus increase the gladness of the world. Happiness is not only the sign of absence of friction, it removes friction. It is not only an indication of health, but a cause of health. One who enjoys his dinner will digest it better than one who eats from duty. If happiness is, then, so important, we may reasonably ask what we can do to secure it.

We may rightly say that we want all the happiness we can have consistent with other aims. A wrong attitude regarding it is that we must purchase it at any cost, no matter how much we have to ride over the rights of others to secure it. This is the attitude of many young people who have been brought up in affluence and who have formed the fatal habit of thinking that life must bring them whatever they want. One longs to say to such young people that happiness does not depend upon what we have, but upon what we are. The person who is discontented in a hovel would be discontented in a palace, for even there he would have to live with himself. Mrs. Wiggs could not have been happier in a mansion than she was in her cabbage-patch, because her happiness was independent of external things. She made it herself by her attitude toward the world, toward her work, toward her troubles and her blessings. Those, however, who are of an unhappy, discontented nature always attribute their lack of happiness to some definite thing or things which their more fortunate friends have and the possession of which they think would bring complete happiness. In the expressive words of George Eliot, “Dissatisfaction seeks a definite object and finds it in the privation of an untried good.”

Happiness is never won by direct pursuit. Just when she seems so close that we are sure we can reach out the hand and grasp her, she is gone, and again we must start in hot pursuit. Many have spent their lives in this way, a bootless chase. It is only when we give up this mad pursuit and attend to our business in life that Happiness comes and makes her home with us. “Pleasure to be got must be forgot.”

But you are happy, so why talk to you about securing something which you already possess, indeed, have never been without? Because there are many kinds of happiness, some far more satisfying and more permanent than others. It is for us to see to it that ours is of a kind that will stand every test. At your stage of life you possess most of the blessings which the world has always regarded as most desirable. If you wish to count them you may begin with youth. To be young means that almost all of life is before you and that no irrevocable mistakes have as yet been made. There are many with misspent lives behind them, who would barter everything they possess for youth and the opportunity to begin all over again. You possess health. What would not the aged and feeble, the crippled, the diseased, give for your vigorous body! Like most of our truest riches, however, health is something we take as a matter of course and do not know the value of until it has departed from us. You have human love. Whoever you are there are those whose world is made brighter because of your presence in it.

Youth, health, love are yours, so why should you not be happy? But I have already said that you are happy. And yet I did not quite mean it. I should probably do you no injustice if I should say that you are not as happy as this splendid trio of blessings would seem to warrant. The reason is that real happiness does not come as a gift. It is achieved happiness that is of most worth.

You have often been told, no doubt, that the school days are the happiest days of life. Some men and women of maturer years are very fond of preaching this doctrine to young people. But it is a wrong and pernicious theory of life, and those who advocate it condemn themselves by their own words, for they show that they have lacked the power to make life richer and deeper as it went on. “I never will believe,” says George Eliot, “that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!”

Getting to the end of school days is not, then, like walking off a precipice. There is much beyond and it is good. To be sure, there will be no more days just like the school days, with their freedom from care, their glorious comradeship, and their stimulus to high endeavor. In future years they doubtless will wear a halo possessed by no others, but this will not mean that they were really the happiest. In fact, if the first twenty years of one’s life have truly prepared one to live, life should constantly grow richer as it moves onward. We should grow happier as we grow older because of two things, increasing power of service, and a growing capacity for enjoyment. Dr. Eliot, ex-President of Harvard University, once defined education as “increasing the capacity for serviceableness and for enjoyment.” In this sense education does not stop with the school days. Each year should reveal new springs of power and should develop within us new resources. Women ought to be even more careful than men to develop such powers and resources, for a man’s active life in the world is much more likely to compel growth in him. How many women there are who, after reaching middle life, when their children are grown up and gone out of the home, find it impossible to secure happy employment for the mind! They might have developed resources and powers which would have given them an ever-increasing interest in life.

We often hear people wish for childhood or youth again. When any one expresses such a wish, he generally means that he would like to be a child or youth again if he could take back with him all the wisdom and all the powers and capacities that the years have brought him in exchange for his vanished youth. But to be a child again, just such a child as he was, and to grow up all over again, making the same unhappy blunders and suffering from the same hard knocks in the process of adjustment to an inexorable universe—who would wish it? As a matter of fact, if we are really wise, we shall never wish that we might repeat any period of life. Always, just beyond and beckoning to us, is the next period, and we should always believe with Browning that “the best is yet to be.” No period of life has or can have a monopoly of happiness.

What, then, is this mysterious thing called happiness, which apparently cannot be taken away from some, yet which others vainly pursue for a lifetime? I have already said that it is something that has to be learned or to be won. It is clear that having everything in the world to make one happy does not always bring happiness, and the reason is that there is no real well-being without consciousness of well-being. If one were heir to vast riches, yet lived and died without knowing of his wealth, it would have been just the same as to have had no wealth. To have youth, health, love, and opportunity, and not to know that one is blest by and through these great gifts, is, perhaps, not greatly different from having none of them. So we see the importance of being fully awake to the blessings we have. You think, for example, that you enjoy and appreciate your home, but if you should learn to-morrow that you had lost it, you would probably discover that you had not received nearly as much happiness from it as you should have. Perhaps you would even recall with remorse that you had sometimes envied the fairer home of some friend, and had allowed yourself to grow quite unhappy over the matter. If those you love best were suddenly to be taken from you, would you then discover how small had been your real appreciation of them? With a deeper appreciation would be found a gratitude constantly translating itself in terms of kindness, patience, and unselfishness. Ask yourself, then, whether you are sure you have derived the happiness that should have been yours from the blessings nearest you.

Have we not learned in part the secret of happiness? Consciousness of our blessings, deep gratitude for them, is one of the chief sources of happiness. And do we not see why we grow happier as we grow older? Our losses may be great,—are almost sure to be great,—but how we learn to appreciate what we have left! How trivialities sink into their place and the great things of life loom large! Once the day was overcast because of some fancied slight or neglect, or the weather had upset some cherished plan, or—but why go on with the list? Since then greater troubles have come and a new sense of proportion has been born within us; a consciousness of our great wealth is ever with us. This is one of the secure foundations of happiness.

Do not wait for Experience to teach you these things, for she keeps a dear school. Learn from the experience of others. There is plenty of justifiable sadness in the world, there is plenty of real trouble. Those of us who are not experiencing it owe it to those who are to be cheerful, serene, and strong, that they may lean on us and that we may help carry some of their heavy burdens.

Since it is entirely possible for life to grow happier as it goes on, and since many people find it exactly the reverse, what more can be said by way of pointing out the right path? And when should one seek this path? May one wait until the years of unhappiness come? One may not wait. The path may be choked with weeds unless one’s feet find it now. As you look forward into the years you have yet to live, what saner question can you ask than how you can find that inward happiness which has for many proved a bulwark against all the buffetings of fate?

It would be hard to over-emphasize the part work plays in making one happy. Idle people are generally unhappy. Look forward, then, to being busy, as long as you live. Find something to do, somewhere, and throw your whole self into your work. It need not be work that is paid for with money, but something to occupy your time and thoughts you must have. You need to feel that by your endeavors you are adding to the world’s welfare. Look forward to getting a large share of your happiness in service and you will not be disappointed. Work is a panacea for most of the ills of life. When a great sorrow comes, how shall one endure it unless one has work to do?

Another deep source of happiness is the carrying of responsibility. It is good to develop early in life the habit of solicitude for others. Fortunate are we if there are those who are in some way dependent upon us; it is good for us to deny ourselves for their sake. Happy is the girl who has younger brothers and sisters needing her affectionate and watchful care.

Love must play a large part in every life. In solitude we become narrow, we can never discover ourselves. We need friends and the stimulus of contact with our fellow men. We must give and receive affection. The trouble with most of us is that we think too much about receiving and not enough about giving. Here as everywhere it is more blessed to give than to receive.

For true happiness we need constantly increasing knowledge. An ignorant life can hardly be a happy life. We should be on terms of closest friendship with books. Every one should have some department or field of learning in which he is steadily making conquests, and this in addition to the reading of the best literature. It may be music, or art, or a science, or a language, or some other pursuit to which one turns for recreation and inspiration. In these days good instruction is obtained so easily that intellectual stagnation is inexcusable. Indeed, any one who is really in earnest can make intellectual progress without instruction except that which one gives himself. I knew a busy lawyer who so mastered the subject of botany through self-instruction that he became an able writer and a recognized authority on the subject. Many have mastered a foreign language with the assistance only of books. What a mistake it is to think that with the closing of the school and college days one should cease to be a student! We are never too old to begin the serious study of some subject hitherto unknown to us. Did not Julia Ward Howe begin the study of Greek at an age when most people only doze by the fire?

I have mentioned as important sources of happiness four things—work, responsibility, love, knowledge. It remains to call attention to three kinds, or perhaps three degrees, of happiness. The lowest is merely pleasure or a succession of pleasures. Pleasure depends largely upon what we have, that is, upon external things. It has no deep roots at life’s center; yet it is good if we estimate it rightly and recognize that it is not real happiness. Beautiful clothes to wear, good things to eat and drink, a fine house to live in—these things all give pleasure, yet many have found happiness without them. Some have had all of these and yet have led discontented lives. Parties, balls, social pleasures of every sort; travel, money to spend according to one’s whims; these have their place. Do they occupy a large place in your life? Well and good; but there is nothing about any of these worthy to be ranked as happiness. You can easily imagine yourself stripped of them all. Would you then be miserable?

Congenial companionship and congenial work come nearer to making real happiness for most of us. Indeed, there are few things upon which the majority of people are so dependent. Yet it would not be difficult to find those who have been deprived of both, and have yet led strong, serene, and useful lives.

You have noticed that the sources of happiness which I have named differ in that while some can be taken away from us, others cannot. It is difficult to conceive of any place or time or circumstances under which we could be deprived of the privilege of loving and serving. Our feeling of obligation and responsibility for others is one that should deepen with years, and from this source we should learn to derive more and more of our happiness. This kind of happiness is very far removed from what we ordinarily think of as pleasure; indeed, it often involves suffering.

“We can only have the highest happiness—such as goes along with being a great man—by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.”

This was the happiness of Lincoln, carrying the burdens of his unhappy country on his suffering heart; it was the happiness of the noble army of martyrs of every age; it was the happiness of Christ. He taught us to call it blessedness. As you carefully study His life and character, you will see that He was acquainted with all three kinds of happiness. He despised not pleasure. He was no ascetic, but came eating and drinking. Great must have been the enjoyment in nature of one who could speak as He spake of the lily of the field that outshone the splendor of Solomon, of the humble sparrow unloved of men, but cared for by the good All-Father, of the green blade bursting through the dark soil, of the fields yellowing for the harvest. He enjoyed mingling with His fellow men and knew the joys of friendship. The work which He had been given to do absorbed Him and filled Him with constant joy. If He had not been happy He could not have drawn others to Him as He did, and above all, little children would not have come unto Him. If we sometimes have a different idea of Him, it is because of the closing scenes of His life, after He became a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

Yet it was blessedness that Christ knew best of all. The deeper joys were His; the joy of self-forgetfulness and of self-sacrifice, and the joy of knowing that He was in perfect harmony with His Father’s will. Yet who shall say that He was not happy? Would He have exchanged His life of toil and hardship and suffering for any other lot? We know that He never sought another. His secret lies open to the world, for He spoke of it over and over again.

Life does not treat us all alike in the matter of pleasure, and if that were the end and aim of existence this would seem to be a very unjust world. Life does not treat us with entire impartiality even in the matter of happiness. Though most of us are given sufficient material to make life rich and full if we will, yet there are lives that seem to be an exception to this rule. But life treats us all alike in that if pleasure is denied us and we have scant material out of which to build happiness, we may at least attain to blessedness. We may have the joy of self-sacrifice, the privilege of living for others, the glad consciousness of duty nobly done, the power of spiritual growth, the blessedness of knowing that our will is in harmony with God’s will. These things the world does not give and it cannot take away.