When to be Happy | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 19, 1872

When to be Happy.

How old are you? Twenty-five? Thirty? Are you happy to-day? Were you happy yesterday? Are you generally happy? If so, you have reason to judge that you will be happy by-and-by. Are you so busy that you have no time to be happy? and are you going to be happy when you are old, and you have not so much to do? No, you will not. You now have a specimen of what you will be when you are old. Look in the face of to-day. That is about the average. That will tell you what you are going to be. What you are carrying along with you is what you will have by-and-by. If you are so conducting yourself that you have peace with God, and with your fellow-men, and with your faculties; if every day you insist that duty shall make you happy, and you take as much time as is needful for the culture of your social faculties, you will not be exhausting life, and it will be continually replenished. But if you are saving everything up till you get to be an old man, habit will stand like a tyrant, and say, “You would not enjoy yourself before, and you shall not now.” How many men there are who have groaned and groaned to make money, that they might be happy by-and-by, but who, when they got to be fifty or sixty years old, had used up all the enjoyable nerve that was in them! During their early life they carried toil and economy and frugality to the excess of stinginess, and when the time came that they expected joy, there was no joy for them.—Plymouth Pulpit.