all the laws of our spiritual life. Yet some of these laws may be rationally inferred. They may be learned from experience and observation. Since they are God's laws, they must all be laws of love, and therefore good; and if carefully obeyed, they must produce the greatest possible amount of happiness. Obedience to divine laws can never be attended with unhappiness. This is ever the result of disobedience.
Now every one knows that people are not happy who are governed by an inordinate self-love, and who seek their own good exclusively, regardless of the good of their neighbor. Every one who has not wholly quenched the Divine Spirit within him, feels that, in obeying at all times the promptings of self-interest—living and acting with a supreme and exclusive regard to himself—he is not obeying the will of God, nor that law of life which God has ordained. He is inwardly conscious of living and acting otherwise than the Heavenly Father would have him. Nor is he happy—far from it—in the perpetual indulgence of his love of self. He is restless and sour and hard and morose. And not only does this love make the soul of its possessor unhappy, but its indulgence is attended with unhappiness to others. Its tendency is altogether evil. Let all men act in obedience to its promptings, and universal hatred, anarchy, war and wretchedness would be the inevitable consequence.
Nor are those persons happy who are in the lust of dominion—who seek to exalt themselves above others and to rule over others; nor those who pride themselves on their attainments, and desire to be esteemed and honored above others on account of them; nor those who
