I SHOULD not recommend a young Minister to pay much deference to the ScOTCH DIVINES. The Erskines, who were the best of them, are dry, and laboured, and prolix, and wearisome. He may find incomparable matter in them, but he should beware of forming his taste and manner after their model. I want a more kind-hearted and liberal sort of divinity. He had much better take up Bishop HALL. There is a set of excellent, but wrongheaded men, who would reform the London preachers on a more elaborate plan. They are not philosophers who talk thus. If Owen himself were to rise from the grave, unless it were for the influence of the great name which he would bring with him, he might close his days with a small congregation, in some little meeting-house.

SHAKSPEARE had a low and licentious taste. When he chose to imagine a virtuous and exalted character, he could completely throw his mind into it, and give the perfect picture of such a character. But he is at home in Falstaff. No high, grand, virtuous, religious aim beams forth in him. A man, whose heart and taste are modelled on the Bible, nauseates him in the mass, while he is enraptured and astonished by the flashes of his preeminent genius.

"HAVE you read my Key to the Romans?" said Dr. TAYLOR, of Norwich, to Mr. NEWTON.-"I have turned it over."-" You have turned it over! And is this the treatment a book must meet with, which has cost me many years of hard study? Must I be told, at last, that you have ' turned it over,' and then thrown it aside? You ought to have read it carefully, and weighed deliberately what comes forward on so serious a subject."-" Hold! You have cut me out full employment, if my life were to be as long as Methuselah's. I have somewhat else to do in the short day allotted me, than to read whatever any one may think it his duty to write. When I read, I wish to read to good purpose; and there are some books, which contradict on the very face of them what appear to me to be first principles. You surely will not say I am bound to read such books. If a man tells me he has a very elaborate argument to prove that two and two make five, I have something else to do than to attend to this argument. If I find the first mouthful of meat which I take from a fine-looking joint on my table is tainted, I need not eat through it to be convinced I ought to send it away."

I NEVER read any sermons so much like WHITFIELD's manner of preaching, as LATIMER'S. You see a simple mind, uttering all its feelings; and

putting forth every thing as it comes, without any reference to books or men, with a naivetè seldom equalled.

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I ADMIRED WITSIUS'S Economy of the Covenants," but not so much as many persons. There is too much system. I used to study Commentators and Systems; but I am come almost wholly, at length, to the Bible. Commentators are excellent, in general, where there are but few difficulties; but they leave the harder knots still untied. I find in the Bible, the more I read, a grand peculiarity, that seems to say to all who attempt to systematize it-"I am not of your kind. I am not amenable to your methods of thinking. I am untractable in your hands. I stand alone. The great and wise shall never exhaust my treasures. By figures and parables I will come down to the feelings and understandings of the ignorant. Leave me as I am, but study me incessantly." CALVIN'S Institutes are, to be sure, great and admirable, and so are his Commentaries; but, after all, if we must have Commentators as we certainly must-POOLE is incomparable, and I had almost said abundant of himself.

YOUNG is, of all other men, one of the most striking examples of the disunion of Piety from

Truth. If we read his most true, impassioned, and impressive estimate of the World and of Religion, we shall think it impossible that he was uninfluenced by his subject. It is, however, a melancholy fact, that he was hunting after preferment at eighty years old; and felt and spoke like a disappointed man. The truth was pictured on his mind in most vivid colours. He felt it, while he was writing. He felt himself on a retired spot; and he saw Death, the mighty Hunter, pursuing the unthinking world. He saw Redemption-its necessity and its grandeur; and, while he looked on it, he spoke as a man would speak whose mind and heart are deeply engaged. Notwithstanding all this, the view did not reach his heart. Had I preached in his pulpit with the fervour and interest that his " Night Thoughts" discover, he would have been terrified. He told a friend of mine, who went to him under religious fears, that he must GO MORE INTO THE WORLD!