using this wisdom to channel our power, following his principles to insure justice and copying him in the showing of love that will meet the needs and fill the hungers he put within us. And all this is what it takes to make us happy.

What It Takes to Be Happy Forever

“Wisdom is for a protection [the same as] money is for a protection; but the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom itself preserves alive its owners.—Eccl. 7:12.

1. What shows the inability of riches to bring lasting happiness?

DO YOU now have what it takes to be happy? If you do, will you have it long? Under the best of circumstances life is short. Like the grass that withers and the flower that fades and the shadow that continues not, man is of few days and returns to the dust. When life is gone happiness ends. Riches cannot preserve it. “Even when a person has an abundance his life does not result from the things he possesses,” Jesus said. And the psalmist states: “Not one of them can by any means redeem even a brother, nor give to God a ransom for him; (and the redemption price of their soul is so precious that it has ceased to time indefinite) that he should still live forever [and] not see the pit. Do not be afraid because some man gains riches, because the glory of his house increases, for at his death he cannot take along anything at all; his glory will not go down along with him himself. For during his lifetime he kept blessing his own soul; (and people will laud you because you do well for yourself) it gradually comes only as far as the generation of his forefathers. Nevermore will they see the light. Earthling man, although in honor, who does not understand, is indeed comparable with the beasts that have been destroyed.”—Luke 12:15; Ps. 49:7-9, 16-20.

NO HAPPINESS FOREVER BY IMMORTAL SOUL

2. By means of what teaching do men refuse to face the fact of death, but what does the Bible show?

² Unwilling to face oblivion, men have buried the fact of death in the fiction of immortality. Their religions teach that the human soul is immortal. Thus they will not be completely ground into the dust by the heel of time. The parade of the years marching over them will not trample them into oblivion. The soul will live on after the body molds in the grave. They will have consciousness after death, they say.