I encounter many difficulties; but, at the same time I feel within me an internal evidence, which, uniting its force with the external, forbids me to disbelieve. When involuntary doubts arise, I immediately silence their importunity by recollecting the weakness of my judgment, and the vain presumption of hastily deciding on the most important of all subjects, against such powerful evidence, and against the major part of the best and wisest men, in regions of the earth the most illuminated. I will learn humility of the humble Jesus, and gratefully accept the beneficial doctrines and glorious offers which his benign religion reaches out to all who sincerely seek him by prayer and penitence. "In vain shall the conceited philosophers, whom fashion and ignorance admire, attempt to weaken my belief, or undermine the principles of my morality. Without their aid, I can be sufficiently wicked, and sufficiently miserable. Human life abounds with evil. I will seek balsams for the wounds of the heart in the sweets of innocence, and in the consolations of religion. Virtue, I am convinced, is the noblest ornament of humanity, and the source of the sublimest and the sweetest pleasure; and piety leads to that peace, which the world, and all that it possesses, cannot bestow. Let others enjoy the pride and pleasure of being called philosophers, deists, and sceptics; be mine the real, unostentatious qualities of the honest, humble, and charitable Christian. When the gaudy glories of fashion and of vain philosophy shall have withered like a short-lived flower, sincere piety and moral honesty shall flourish as the cedar of Lebanon. "But I repress my triumphs. After all my improvements, and all my desires of perfection, I shall still be greatly defective. Therefore, to whatever degree of excellence I advance, let me never forget to show to others that indulgence, which my infirmities, my errors, and my voluntary misconduct, will require both from them and from mine and their Almighty and most Merciful Father." Knox's Essays. mind is capable of manly improvement. Their solicitude still continues, and no trouble nor expense is spared in giving you all the instructions and accomplishments which may enable you to act your part in life as a man of polished sense and confirmed virtue. You have, then, already contracted a great debt of gratitude to them. You can pay it by no other method but by using the advantages which their goodness has afforded you. If your endeavours are deficient, it is in vain that you have tutors, books, and all the external apparatus of literary pursuits. You must love learning, if you intend to possess it. In order to love it, you must feel its delights; in order to feel its delights, you must apply to it, however irksome at first, closely, constantly, and for a considerable time. If you have resolution enough to do this, you cannot but love learning; for the mind always loves that to which it has been long, steadily, and voluntarily attentive. Habits are formed, which render what was at first disagreeable, not only pleasant, but necessary. Ele Pleasant, indeed, are all the paths which lead to polite and elegant literature. Yours, then, is surely a lot particularly happy. Your education is of such a sort, that its principal scope is to prepare you to receive a refined pleasure during your life. Elegance, or delicacy of taste, is one of the first objects of a classical discipline;and it is this fine quality which opens a new world to the scholar's view. gance of taste has a connexion with many virtues, and all of them virtues of the most amiable kind. It tends to render you at once good and agreeable. You must, therefore, be an enemy to your own enjoyments, if you enter on the discipline which leads to the attainment of a classical and liberal education with reluctance. Value duly the opportunities you enjoy, and which are denied to thousands of your fellow-creatures. Without exemplary diligence you will make but a contemptible proficiency. You may, indeed, pass through the forms of schools and universities, but you will value. The proper sort and degree of bring nothing away from them of real diligence you cannot possess, but by the efforts of your own resolution. Your instructor may, indeed, confine you within the walls of a school a certain number of hours. He may place books before you, and compel you to fix your eyes upon them; but no authority can chain down your mind. Your thoughts will escape from every external restraint, and, amidst the most serious lectures, may be ranging in the wild pursuit of trifles or vice. Rules, restraints, commands, and punishments, may, indeed, assist in strengthening your resolution; but, without your own voluntary choice, your diligence will not often conduce to your pleasure or advantage. Though this truth is obvious, yet it seems to be a secret to those parents who expect to find their son's improvement increase in proportion to the number of tutors and external assistances which their opulence has enabled them to provide. These assistances, indeed, are sometimes afforded, chiefly that the young heir to a title or estate may indulge himself in idle ness and nominal pleasures. The lesson is construed to him, and the exercise written for him, by the private tutor, while the hapless youth is engaged in some ruinous pleasure, which at the same time prevents him from learning any thing desirable, and leads to the formation of destructive habits, which can seldom be removed. But the principal obstacle to improvement at your school, especially if you are too plentifully supplied with money, is a perverse ambition of being distinguished as a boy of spirit in mischievous pranks, in neglecting the tasks and lessons, and for every vice and irregularity which the puerile age can admit. You will have sense enough, I hope, to discover, beneath the mask of gaiety and good-nature, that malignant spirit of detraction, which endeavours to render the boy who applies to books, and to all the duties and proper business of the school, ridiculous. You will see, by the light of your reason, that the ridicule is misapplied. You will discover that the boys who have recourse to ridicule, are, for the most part, stupid, unfeeling, ignorant and vicious. Their noisy folly, their bold confidence, their contempt of learning, and their defiance of authority, are, for the most part, the genuine effects of hardened insensibility. Let not their insults and ill-treatment dispirit you. If you yield to them with a tame and abject submission, they will not fail to triumph over you with additional insolence. Display a fortitude in your pursuits equal in degree to the obstinacy in which they persist in theirs. Your fortitude will soon overcome theirs, which is seldom any thing more than the audacity of a bully. Indeed, you cannot go through a school with ease to yourself, and with success, without a considerable share of courage. I do not mean that sort of courage which leads to battles and contentions, but which enables you to have a will of your own, and to pursue what is right amidst all the persecutions of surrounding enviers, dunces, and detractors. Ridicule is the weapon made use of at school, as well as in the world, when the fortresses of virtue are to be assailed. You will effectually repel the attack by a dauntless spirit and unyielding perseverance. Though numbers are against you, yet, with truth and rectitude on your side, you may be IPSE AGMEN; though alone, yet equal to an army. By laying in a store of useful knowledge, adorning your mind with elegant literature, improving and establishing your conduct by virtuous principles, you cannot fail of being a comfort to those friends who have supported you, of being happy within yourself, and of being well received by mankind. Honour and success in life would probably attend you. Under all circumstances you will have an internal source of consolation and entertainment, of which no sublunary vicissitude can deprive you. Time shows how much wiser is your choice than that of your idle companions, who would gladly have drawn you into their association, or rather into their conspiracy, as it has been called, against good manners, and against all that is honourable and useful. While you appear in society as a respectable and valuable member of it, they have sacrificed at the shrine of vanity, pride, extravagance, and false pleasure, their health and their sense, their fortunes and their characters. Knox's Essays. § 97. On Goodness of Heart. Whoever has made accurate observations on men and manners, will easily perceive that the praise of goodness of heart is usually accompanied with an oblique insinuation of intellectual imbecility. I believe him to be a well-meaning man, says the malignant panegyrist, and if there is any fault in him, it will be found rather in his head than in his heart. Nothing could be better contrived by a crafty and envious world to render the amiable quality, good nature, contemptible, than to represent it as the effect or as the companion of folly. It is, indeed, true, that innocence and integrity are usually accompanied with simplicity; not, however, with that sort of simplicity which is sometimes synonymous with folly; but with a generosity and openness of heart, which had rather lose its objects than obtain them by deceit; which leads the tongue boldly to speak what the heart honestly conceives. If we weigh the satisfactions of an open and upright conduct, of a clear conscience, and of that liberty which we enjoy by thinking, speaking, and acting, without mean and servile restraints, it will, I believe, be found, that this simplicity is true wisdom, and that the cunning of the worldly wise is real and egregious imprudence. Goodness of heart, whether it be a natural or acquired goodness, is indeed, in every respect, the highest excellence. It is the only quality which can rescue human nature from the disgrace and misery of its wretched weaknesses, and its powerful tendencies to evil. It raises the poor worm that otherwise crawls on a dunghill, and stings and bites his wretched companions, to an exalted place in the scale of being, and causes him to assimilate with the divine nature. I shall exhibit to my youthful readers, whose hearts are yet susceptible of whatever bias they choose to give them, two characters; in one of which appeared goodness of heart, and in the other worldly wisdom or cunning, or the art of pleasing for the sake of profit. If any one should hesitate in choosing whether of the two shall be his model, he need not hesitate at beginning a reformation of himself, for he may depend upon it, that his own heart stands greatly in need of amend ment. Serpens (for such let us suppose to be his name) has persuaded himself that he sees farther into things than the rest of his species. He considers religion as priest craft, morality as the invention of politicians, and taste and literature as the amusement of fools. His philosophy, and all his better pursuits and ideas, are circumscribed within limits extremely narrow. Pleasure and interest are his chief good, his only objects of serious pursuit; and in the attainment of these he is not scrupulously delicate. There is, indeed, no virtue or good quality, the appearance of which he does not assume; because, while mankind are weak enough to judge and esteem men according to moral and religious prejudices, a plausible appearance is essentially necessary to success in life. External decency is his highest aim. Sincerity or sound principles would but retard his purposes. Compassion he never felt, and is equally a stranger to love and friendship, though he is always professing them to persons of fortune and distinction, whom he idolizes with religious adora-tion; and this is the only sentiment which he feels bordering upon religion. By a life spent in abject servility, in courting a capricious world, in deceiving the credulous, in contriving schemes of advantage or pleasure, and in hardening his conscience, he has, at last, in his fiftieth year, obtained some promotion, and accumulated a handsome sum of money. But he cannot enjoy it, now he is possessed of it. The same greedy selfishness which taught him to debase his soul in pursuing interest and private gratification, still operates on his conduct, and renders him a complete miser. Though he has long enjoyed a competency, he never had spirit enough to marry. He was afraid of the expense. He hates his relations, because he thinks they expect his fortune at his decease. He has made no real friends, though he has deceived thousands by professing friendship, for the easier accomplishment of his dirty designs. All the neighbours detest him; and he envies every one of them who appears to be happier than himself, which, indeed, they all do; for his heart is torn with malignity, with fears, anxieties, and covetousness. He bears, however, the character of a shrewd and sensible man; one who knows the world, and learned at an early age to make it his bubble. His advice is considered as an oracle in all pecuniary business; and no attorney would be half so much consulted, if he did not render himself almost inaccessible by the moroseness of his temper. As, in his youth, he was all submission and gentleness, and perfectly skilled in the celebrated art of pleasing; so now, when the mask is no longer necessary, his natural disposition breaks out in all its horrid deformity. But the misery which he occasions to all around him falls upon himself, by the just retribution of Providence. The heart which has been the receptacle of every vice and every meanness, is always the seat of uneasy sensation. The stupid in sensibility with respect to the finer feelings, which usually characterizes that sort of shrewd men who are celebrated in the world as men who know things so well, may, indeed, guard them from pungent affliction; but it is itself a curse most devoutly to be deprecated. Simplicius was the son of parents remarkable for the piety and regularity of their lives. He received a liberal education in its most comprehensive form, and found every moral instruction which he derived from books, and from his preceptor, confirmed by example at home. All his delicate sensibilities were gradually nursed to a state of perfection by the innocence and temperance of his life; by the piety and virtue of his family, in which such respect was paid to him while a boy, that not a word that could convey a loose or improper idea was ever uttered in his presence. He married early, and obeyed the dictates of his heart in selecting a most amiable woman, of beauty, sense, and temper, but of little or no fortune. The shrewd and wise men of the world laughed and pitied. Simplicius, however, had never any reason to repent. His children are his chief delight; but he loves his friends with sincere and unalterable affection; and there is no species of distress which he does not pity and relieve to the best of his power. The amiableness of his manners, and the regularity of his conduct, gave him the advantage of character, the want of which can seldom be supplied by any worldly policy. With this powerful recommendation he has made his way to eminence, and enjoys his success with the truest relish. It is, indeed, unembittered by any consciousness of sinister modes in securing it. He always proceeded in the straight road of common sense and honesty. He knew of no obliquities; for, indeed, he found the art of life very plain and easy, and by no means such as requires the precepts of a Chesterfield. His heart and his understanding are both excellent, and, co-operating with each other, have conducted him to happiness through the flowery paths of innocence. His own bosom has been a perpetual spring of agreeable sensations to himself, and to all who were so fortunate as to be allied to him by kindred, by affinity, by acquaintance, or in the course of his negociations. A good conscience will cause the evening of life to close in the sweetest serenity, as the day has been distinguished by unclouded sunshine. Whatever the short-sighted votaries of avarice and ambition may assert, there is no doubt but that real goodness of heart is the noblest ornament of human nature, and the least fallible source of permanent satisfaction. I have often therefore lamented, that, in the course of what is called a liberal education, very little attention has been paid at our best schools to the culture of the heart. While good seeds have been sown in the understanding, the heart has been suffered to be overrun with weeds and briars. In truth, learning and abilities, without goodness of heart, constitute that kind of wisdom which is foolishness in the sight of reason and of God. Without goodness of heart, man, however accomplished, is so far from being but a little lower than the angels, that he is scarcely above the accursed spirits, and by no means equal to many of the brutes, dogs in particular, who often exhibit most amiable instances of a good heart in the virtues of gratitude, sincere affection, and Knox's Essays. fidelity. § 98. A Letter to a young Nobleman, soon after his leaving School. SIR, DEAN BOLTON. The obligations I have to your family, cannot but make me solicitous for the welfare of every member of it, and for that of yourself in particular, on whom its honours are to descend. Such instructions and such examples, as it has been your happiness to find, must, necessarily, raise great expectations of you, and will not allow you any praise for a common degree of merit. You will not be thought to have worth, if you have not a distinguished worth, and what may suit the concurrence of so many extraordinary advantages. In low life, our good or bad qualities are known to few-to those only who are related to us, who converse with, or live near us. In your station, you are exposed to the notice of a kingdom. The excellencies or defects of a youth of quality make a part of polite conversation-area topic agreeable to all who have been liberally educated; to all who are not amongst the meanest of the people. Should I, in any company, begin a H character of my friend with the hard name, whom I hope you left well at, they would naturally ask me, What relation he bore to the Emperor's minister? When I answered, That I had never heard of his bearing any; that all I knew of him was, his being the son of a German merchant, sent into this kingdom for education; I probably should be thought impertinent, for introducing such a subject; and I certainly should soon be obliged to drop it, or be wholly disregarded, were I unwise enough to continue it. But if, upon a proper occasion, I mentioned, that I had known the Honourable -from his infancy, and that I had made such observations on his capacity, his application, his attainments, and his general conduct, as induced me to conclude, he would one day be an eminent ornament and a very great blessing to his country, I should have an hundred questions asked me about him-my narrative would appear of consequence to all who heard it, and would not fail to engage their attention. I have, I must own, often wondered, that the consideration of the numbers, who are continually remarking the behaviour of the persons of rank among us, has had so little influence upon them-has not produced a quite different effect from what, alas! we every where sadly experience. Negligere quid de se quisque sentiat, non solum arrogantis est, sed etiam omnino dissoluti. I need not tell you where the remark is: it has, indeed, so much obvious truth, that it wants no support from authority. Every generous principle must be extinct in him, who knows that it is said of him, or that it justly may be said of himHow different is this young man from his noble father: the latter took every course that could engage the public esteem: the former is as industrious to forfeit it. The sire was a patron of religion, virtue, and every commendableauality: his descendant is an impious, ignorant, profligate wretch; raised above others, but to have his folly more public-high in his rank, only to extend his infamy. A thirst after fame may have its inconveniences, but which are by no means equal to those that attend a contempt of it. Our earnestness in its pursuit may possibly slacken our pursuit of true desert; but indifferent we cannot be to reputation, without being so to virtue. In these remarks you, Sir, are no far ther concerned, than as you must, sometimes, converse with the persons to whom they may be applied, and your detestation of whom one cannot do too much to increase. Bad examples may justly raise our fears even for him, who has been the most wisely educated, and is the most happily disposed: no caution against them is superfluous: in the place, in which you are at present, you will meet with them in all shapes. Under whatever disadvantages I offer you my advice, I am thus far qualified for giving it, that I have experienced some of the dangers which will be your trial, and had sufficient opportunity of observing others. The observations I have made, that are at all likely to be of service to you, either from their own weight, or the hints they may afford for your improving upon them, I cannot conceal from you. What comes from him who wishes you so well, and so much esteems you, will be sufficiently recommended by its motives; and may, therefore, possibly be read with a partiality in its favour, that shall make it of more use than it could be of from any intrinsic worth. But, without further preface or apology, let me proceed to the points that I think deserving your more particular consideration; and begin with what, certainly, should, above all other things, be considered-RELIGION. It is, indeed, what every man says he has more or less considered: and by this, every man acknowledges its importance: yet, when we inquire into the consideration that has been given it, we can hardly persuade ourselves, that a point of the least consequence could be so treated. To our examination here we usually sit down resolved, how far our conviction shall extend. In the pursuit of natural or mathematical knowledge we engage, disposed to take things as we find them-to let our assent be directed by the evidence we meet with: but the doctrines of religion each inspects, not in order to inform himself what he ought to believe and practise; but to reconcile them with his present faith and way of life-with the passions he favours -with the habits he has contracted. And that this is, really, the case, is evident, from the little alteration there is in the manners of any, when they know as much of religion as they ever intend to know. You see them the same persons as formerly; they are only furnished with |