Many sources of enjoyment and comfort have been removed; but the spring to which our beloved and revered parents led us in our early years, that fountain whence issued our sweetest and purest enjoyments, is still open to us, even the well of living waters which never can be dried up; and though those loved ones are departed, and we cannot but feel the loss of their society, we are happy in the hope of soon meeting them, where there are pleasures for evermore. Religion--the knowledge of God--has been to us our strength and our happiness, the source of all we have enjoyed worth calling enjoyment: it has been the sunshine which, in the hour of prosperity, has made earth fair unto us as the bowers of Eden; and when the darkness of adversity encompassed us, it has been the star whose beaming indicated the approach of the morning’s brightness. =THE PEARL OF DAYS.= [Illustration] Man is not left, even in this state of existence, like the lower animals, to draw his chief happiness from the indulgence of his appetites, or to be led by the blind, but unerring impulse of instinct, to his chief good. He is endowed with reasoning powers and moral sentiments, which require to be enlightened and exercised, in order to their proper direction and healthful development. His happiness is as inseparably connected with the cultivation and exercise of the faculties of his mind, as it is with the healthful development and proper exercise of his bodily organs. We meet with abundant proof of this in the state of savage tribes, who shelter themselves in clay-built hovels, wrap themselves in the skins of beasts, and obtain a precarious subsistence from the scanty produce of the uncultivated ground, or the flesh of wild animals. If we compare their means of sustaining life, their sources of enjoyment, their religious worship, their daily habits, and their daily labours, in a word, their whole state, with the state of a civilized and enlightened community--even could we bring ourselves to look upon man as merely an intelligent and improvable animal, formed exclusively for this present life--we are irresistibly led to the conclusion, that whatever tends to elevate or refine his nature, to give to his reasoning faculties and his moral sentiments a controlling power over his appetites and propensities, is of vast importance to his well-being. It guards him from evils to which, while his animal nature is left without due restraint from his higher faculties and sentiments, he is exposed, opens to him sources of enjoyment, and discovers supplies, of which, while his intellectual nature is uncultivated, he is incapable of availing himself.