than I once did; and have much more charity for many who, by the want of gifts, do make an obscurer profession than they. once thought that almost all that could pray movingly and fluently, and talk well of religion, had been saints. But experience hath opened to me what odious crimes may consist with high profession; and I have met with divers obscure persons, not noted for any extraordinary profession, or forwardness in religion, but only to live a quiet blameless life, whom I have after found to have long lived, as far as I could discern, a truly godly and sanctified life; only, their prayers and duties were by accident kept secret from other men's observation. Yet he that upon this pretence would confound the godly and the ungodly, may as well go about to lay heaven and hell together.

DESIRE OF APPROBATION.

I am much less regardful of the approbation of man, and set much lighter by contempt or applause, than I did long ago. I am oft suspicious that this is not only from the increase of selfdenial and humility, but partly from my being glutted and surfeited with human applause: and all worldly things appear most vain and unsatisfactory, when we have tried them most. But though I feel that this hath some hand in the effect, yet, as far as I can perceive, the knowledge of man's nothingness, and God's transcendent greatness, with whom it is that I have most to do, and the sense of the brevity of human things, and the nearness of eternity, are the principal causes of this effect; which some have imputed to self-conceitedness and morosity.

CHARACTER OF SIR MATTHEW HALE.

He was a man of no quick utterance, but spake with great reason. He was most precisely just; insomuch that, I believe, he would have lost all he had in the world rather than do an unjust act: patient in hearing the most tedious speech which any man had to make for himself: the pillar of justice, the refuge of the subject who feared oppression, and one of the greatest honors of his majesty's government; for, with some other upright judges, he upheld the honor of the English nation, that it fell not into the reproach of arbitrariness, cruelty, and utter confusion. Every man that had a just cause, was almost past fear if he could but bring it to the court or assize where he was judge; for the other judges seldom contradicted him.

He was the great instrument for rebuilding London; for when au act was made for deciding all controversies that hindered it, he was the constant judge, who for nothing followed the work, and, by his prudence and justice, removed a multitude of great impediments.

His great advantage for innocency was, that he was no lover of riches or of grandeur. His garb was too plain; he studiously avoided all unnecessary familiarity with great persons, and all that manner of living which signifieth wealth and greatness. He kept no greater a family than myself. I lived in a small house, which, for a pleasant back opening, he had a mind to; but caused a stranger, that he might not be suspected to be the man, to know of me whether I were willing to part with it, before he would meddle with it. In that house he lived contentedly, without any pomp, and without costly or troublesome retinue or visitors; but not without charity to the poor. He continued the study of phy sics and mathematics still, as his great delight. He hath himself written four volumes in folio, three of which I have read, against atheism, Sadduceeism, and infidelity, to prove first the Deity, and then the immortality of man's soul, and then the truth of Christianity and the Holy Scripture, answering the infidel's objections. against Scripture. It is strong and masculine, only too tedious for impatient readers. He said he wrote it only at vacant hours in his circuits, to regulate his meditations, finding, that while he wrote down what he thought on, his thoughts were the easier kept close to work, and kept in a method. But I could not persuade him to publish them.

The conference which I had frequently with him, mostly about the immortality of the soul, and other philosophical and foundation points, was so edifying, that his very questions and objections did. help me to more light than other men's solutions. Those who take none for religious who frequent not private meetings, &c., took him for an excellently righteous moral man; but I, who heard and read his serious expressions of the concernments of eternity, and saw his love to all good men, and the blamelessness of his life, thought better of his piety than my own. When the peoplc crowded in and out of my house to hear, he openly showed me so great respect before them at the door, and never spake a word against it, as was no small encouragement to the common peop.e to go on; though the other sort muttered, that a judge should seem so far to countenance that which they took to be against the law. He was a great lamenter of the extremities of the times, and of the violence and foolishness of the predominant clergy, and a great desirer of such abatements as might restore us all to serviceableness and unity. He had got but a very small estate, though he had long the greatest practice, because he would take but little money, and undertake no more business than he could well despatch. He often offered to the lord chancellor to resign his place, when he was blamed for doing that which he supposed was justice.

THEOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES.

My mind being these many years immersed in studies of this nature, and having also long wearied myself in searching what fathers and schoolmen have said of such things before us, and my genius abhorring confusion and equivocals, I came, by many years' longer study, to foresee that most of the doctrinal controversies among Protestants are far more about equivocal words than matter; and it wounded my soul to perceive what work, both tyrannical and unskilful, disputing clergymen had made these thirteen hundred years in the world! Experience, since the year 1643, till this year, 1675, hath loudly called me to repent of my own prejudices, sidings, and censurings of causes and persons not understood, and of all the miscarriages of my ministry and life which have been thereby caused; and to make it my chief work to call men that are within my hearing to more peaceable thoughts, affections, and practices. And my endeavors have not been in vain, in that the ministers of the county where I lived, were very many of such a peaceable temper; and a great number more through the land, by God's grace (rather than any endeavors of mine) are so minded. But the sons of the cowl were exasperated the more against me, and accounted him to be against every man that called all men to love and peace, and was for no man as in a contrary way.

JOHN TILLOTSON, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born in Sowerby, in York shire, in 1630. His father was a strict Puritan, and carefully instilled his own principles into the mind of his son, and in 1647 sent him to Cambridge to be under the tuition of David Clarkson, an eminent Presbyterian divine. After leaving college he became tutor in the family of Edmund Prideux, the attor ney-general of Cromwell. In 1661, one year after the accession of Charles II., he complied with the act of uniformity, and consequently soon received a curacy in the Established Church; after which he rose successively, through the many gradations, till in 1690 he was elevated to the see of Canterbury. He lived to enjoy his new honors but four years, dying in 1694.

The sermons of Tillotson are his principal compositions, and so very popular was he, in his day, as a preacher, that a bookseller gave to his widow two thousand five hundred guineas for the copyright. They were proposed to divines as "models of correct and elegant composition," but they will not quite bear such eulogy. Perspicuity, smoothness, and verbal purity belong to them, but they do not possess much richness or vigor of thought. Still, however, his writings may be read with great pleasure as well as profit!

1 "The sermors of Tillotson were, for half a century, more read than any in our language: they are now bought almost as waste paper, and hardly read at all."—Hallam.

"Simplicity is the great beauty of Tillotson's manner. His style is always pure, indeed, and perspicuous, but careless and remiss; too often feeble and languid; with little beauty in the construction of his sentences, which are frequently suffered to drag unharmoniously; seldom any attempt

FALSE AND TRUE PLEASURE.

Nothing is more certain in reason and experience, than that every inordinate appetite and affection is a punishment to itself; and is perpetually crossing its own pleasure, and defeating its own satisfaction, by overshooting the mark it aims at. For instance, intemperance in eating and drinking, instead of delighting and satisfying nature, doth but load and clog it; and instead of quenching a natural thirst, which it is extremely pleasant to do creates an unnatural one, which is troublesome and endless. The pleasure of revenge, as soon as it is executed, turns into grief and pity, guilt and remorse, and a thousand melancholy wishes that we had restrained ourselves from so unreasonable an act. And the same is as evident in other sensual excesses, not so fit to be described. We may trust Epicurus, for this, that there can be no true pleasure without temperance in the use of pleasure. And God and reason hath set us no other bounds concerning the use of sensual pleasures, but that we take care not to be injurious to ourselves, or others, in the kind or degree of them. And it is very visible, that all sensual excess is naturally attended with a double inconvenience: as it goes beyond the limits of nature, it begets bodily pains and diseases: as it transgresseth the rules of reason and religion, it breeds guilt and remorse in the mind. And these are, beyond comparison, the two greatest evils in this world; a diseased body, and a discontented mind; and in this I am sure I speak to the inward feeling and experience of men; and say nothing but what every vicious man finds, and hath a more lively sense of, than is to be expressed by words.

When all is done, there is no pleasure comparable to that of innocency, and freedom from the stings of a guilty conscience; this is a pure and spiritual pleasure, much above any sensual delight. And yet among all the delights of sense, that of health (which is the natural consequent of a sober, and chaste, and regular life) is a sensual pleasure far beyond that of any vice. For it is the life of life, and that which gives a grateful relish to all our other enjoyments. It is not indeed so violent and transporting a pleasure, but it is pure, and even, and lasting, and hath no guilt or regret, no sorrow and trouble in it, or after it: which is a worni that infallibly breeds in all vicious and unlawful pleasures, and makes them to be bitterness in the end.

EVIDENCE OF A CREATOR IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD.

How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into

towards strength or sublimity. But notwithstanding these defects, such a constant vein of piety and good sense runs through his works, such an earnest and serious manner, and so much usetul Instruction conveyed in a style so pure, natural, and unaffected, as will justly commend him to high regard."--Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Lect. xix.

an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose! And may not a little book be as easily made by chance, as this great volume of the world! How long might a man be in sprinkling colors upon a canvas with a careless hand, before they could happen to make the exact picture of a man? And is a man easier made by chance than this picture? How long might twenty thousand blind men, which should be sent out from the several remote parts of England, wander up and down before they would all meet upon Salisbury Plains, and fall into rank and file in the exact order of an army? And yet this is much more easy to be imagined, than how the innumerable blind parts of matter should rendezvous themselves into a world.

EDUCATION.1

Such ways of education as are prudently fitted to the particular disposition of children, are like wind and tide together, which will make the work go on amain: but those ways which are applied cross to nature are like wind against tide, which will make a stir and conflict, but a very slow progress.

The principles of religion and virtue must be instilled and dropped into them by such degrees, and in such a measure, as they are capable of receiving them: for children are narrowmouthed vessels, and a great deal cannot be poured into them at

once.

Young years are tender, and easily wrought upon, apt to be moulded into any fashion: they are like moist and soft clay, which is pliable to any form; but soon grows hard, and then nothing is to be made of it.

Great severities do often work an effect quite contrary to that which was intended; and many times those who were bred up in a very severe school, hate learning ever after for the sake of the cruelty that was used to force it upon them. So, likewise, an endeavor to bring children to piety and goodness by unreasonable strictness and rigor, docs often beget in them a lasting disgust and prejudice against religion, and teacheth them to hate virtue, at the same time that they teach them to know it.

FORMATION OF A YOUTHFUL MIND.

Men glory in raising great and magnificent structures, and find a secret pleasure to see sets of their own planting grow up and

"Aas! how many examples are now presented to our memory, of young persons the most anxiously and expensively be-schoolmastered, be-tutored, be-lectured, any taing but EDUCATED; who have received arms and ammunition, instead of skill, strength, and courage; varnished rather than polished; perilously over-civilized, and most pitiably uncultivated! And all from inattention the method dictated by nature herself,-to the simple truth, that, as the forms in all organized existence, so must all true and living knowledge proceed FROM WITHIN; that it may be trained, supported, fed, excited. but can never be infused or impressed."-Coleridge, " Friend," . 224.