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merous calls and interruptions that arise in all secular professions, that collectedness of principle, that steady march of virtue, which are the fruits of much reasoning with one's self, and the tacit victories of the heart, are hardly to be expected in any eminent degree, from men immersed in interested pursuits and habituated to look upon worldly advantage as the great concern of their being.

If some of our teachers are more engaged than others; if some are even loaded with occupation; yet this occupation, however great, is always, or should be always, calculated to season their minds with wholesome lessons, to supply matter for the highest contemplations, and to purify, whether it be little or much, the leisure they enjoy.

I consider that our Creator has made us all stewards in different departments, and of different trusts; that one is a steward of his riches, another of his health, another of his faculties, and that thus one will be more particularly responsible on one account than on another. The clergy are stewards of their leisure, in as much as they, for the greater part, possess more of it than other men. To him, therefore, who has husbanded well this leisure, it may perhaps be said, when the moment of retribution shall arrive-" Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over thy portion of time: I will make thee partaker of eternity!"

The space, it is true, is circumscribed, in which this leisure is to be exerted: and this I will allow to be a most honourable ground of complaint, in those who have exhausted all the opportunities of doing good, which the limits of their station afford; who have silenced every call of misery; removed every aching doubt; adjusted every family dissension; and performed every part of their commission within the

reach of their ability, to the extent of their parochial charge. But I cannot admit that the space for their labours to move in is too confined to nourish that dignified love of praise, and that wholesome ambition, which, they may fairly contend, is a very principal and commendable spring of virtuous actions. The indeterminate admiration of crowds, where few can give any better reason for their applause than because those about them applaud, may satisfy a coarse appetite for praise, and an avidity that excludes preference; but a noble mind values admiration for the spirit in which it is bestowed; and is more flattered by the eulogies of humble gratitude, and the unsuborned testimonies of rustic veneration, than the senseless shouts of staring multitudes, that have nothing but noise and number to enforce their applause. It was wisely said to Alexander, in reproof of his extravagant thirst of fame, that but little more than Greece was sufficient to render Hercules a demigod, while all the world was not sufficient to render Alexander a Hercules.

The want of room, therefore, in their several spheres, for the exertion of their industry and talents, supplies no excuse to clergymen for that deviation, too common among them, from the paths of their profession, and the adoption of new and strange characters. As every man who deserts his character, forfeits the esteem and credit attached to it, so some men can repair this loss by their new acquisitions and collateral attainments; but a clergyman is a double loser, who departs out of his own province, in search of remote excellence: he is contemptible for what he has abandoned, and ridiculous for what he assumes. When I see, therefore, a minister of the gospel straining every nerve to shine in the beau monde, and pass for a choice spirit, I look upon such

a person as the most miserable of all dupes to his vanity; and such a conduct as no bad comment on that energetic line of the poet's,

"Guilt's blunder, and the loudest laugh of Hell."

A grave and modest carriage in a young clergyman is so well rewarded, and there is yet remaining in our country such a disposition to venerate a virtuous parish priest, that one cannot but wonder, that a description of men can prevail upon themselves to forfeit this pre-eminence, for the sake of a profane distinction in characters and attainments, which in others are indecorous and unamiable; in them preposterous and criminal. There is, in life, a contrast between certain professions, and certain manners, which deepens the scandal of small obliquities and irregularities of conduct. Thus, in one who is reverend by his profession, levity is laxness of principle, wantonness is wickedness, intemperance is debauchery, violence is outrage, vanity is vice, obscenity is profanation, idleness is desertion, mimicry is buffoonery, and swearing is blaspheming.

There certainly is, in the mass of mankind, a natural and general feeling of physical and moral proportion, which no logic can subvert; they will continue as long as the present system holds, in spite of all our reasoning and declamation, to look with ridicule upon the man who on the Sunday is expounding the gospel in the pulpit, on Monday cutting capers in a ball-room, singing glees at a club-dinner on the Wednesday, riding after a fox on the Thursday, on Friday betting on a race-ground, acting Falstaff at a private theatre on the Saturday, and again, on the Sunday, expounding the gospel, to which the same commentary succeeds during the week following.

A prelate was taken prisoner in France, by Richard

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the First. The pope, being informed of his imprisonment, wrote in a peremptory manner to the king, to insist upon the immediate release of his beloved son. Upon which his majesty sent to his holiness the bishop's whole set of armour, with this satirical answer, "See now if this be thy son's coat or not." A modern curate in a domino, or with his hunting whip and cap, is almost as little in character, as the bishop in his suit of armour.

A well-directed and intelligent mind is thoroughly aware how much the system of this world depends upon rules, decorums, and forms: it is by these that all the beggary of life is covered, and a skreen is placed before the nakedness of our minds. These remain in the habits, even when the essence of virtue is departed from the principles, and keep even the vicious in a certain awe of each other; they supply the place of reason, to the simple and uninstructed, and will sometimes bind stronger than the laws of one's country, or the dictates of conscience. When I observe, therefore, a manly, spirited, and well-informed person, whose mind is in itself above the necessity of them, thus condescending, for the sake of example, to the little forms and usages of society, I regard this conduct as an unequivocal mark of greatness of soul, inasmuch as it discovers a disdain of those diminutive triumphs, those facile victories, which are gained from such petty contests.

It may be true, that set forms and observances are not equally necessary to all; but if the ignorant and uninstructed discover, by the cheapness and neglect in which they are held by wise men, that they were designed only as helps to their own incapacity, and as corroborations of their own weakness, the pride of our nature will dictate an opposition in the persons to whom they lend a very essential support. There

were some mathematicians, says Selden, who could, with one stroke of their pen, describe a circle, and, with the next touch, point out the centre. Is it therefore reasonable to banish all use of the compasses? Set forms are a pair of compasses.

Those who are occupied about their daily concerns, or to whom their situations have denied them all the advantages of culture and intellectual exercise, will necessarily judge confusedly of distant objects; they will necessarily, in the consideration of them, seize upon those parts which come most within the sphere of their senses and observation, and upon the testimony they offer, conclude in regard to the whole. Thus ordinary men contemplate religion in its professors; they appreciate its worth, by the operation of it upon their lives; they see its order, its beauty, and its harmony, in the decency, the dignity, and the consistency of their pastors; and raise their thoughts to the conception of its internal excellence, on the testimony of those external marks with which it is accompanied.

But those indecorums and irregularities which, in the daily conduct of a clergyman, are such stains and blemishes in his character, are downright deformities in his official capacity. When he is not content with degrading his profession by his ordinary manner of comporting himself, but must even introduce his coxcombries, affectations, and eccentricities into the high service in which he is engaged in the pulpit, the friends of religion have only to mourn over his folly and wickedness, while the scoffers grow more bold in their ridicule and loud in their exclamations, insult the feeble and confound the irresolute, by casting in their teeth the depravity of their teachers.

It has always appeared to me, that human arro

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