e necessity of this discipline. We must know in what it consists,
and how it is to be conducted. In completing, therefore, the plan I have
proposed to myself, I am now to give a few hints respecting the mode in
which the study is to be carried on, and obstacles to be surmounted.
These hints, gathered partly from experience and partly from observation
and books, will be necessarily incomplete; but not, it is hoped,
altogether useless to those who are asking some direction.

1. The first thing to be observed is, that the student who would acquire
facility in this art, should bear it constantly in mind, and have regard
to it in all his studies, and in his whole mode of study. The reason is
very obvious. He that would become eminent in any pursuit, must make it
the primary and almost exclusive object of his attention. It must never
be long absent from his thoughts, and he must be contriving how to
promote it, in every thing he undertakes. It is thus that the miser
accumulates, by making the most trifling occurrences the occasions of
gain; and thus the ambitious man is on the alert to forward his purposes
of advancement by little events which another would pass unobserved. So
too he, the business of whose life is preaching, should be on the watch
to render every thing subservient to this end. The inquiry should always
be, how he can turn the knowledge he is acquiring, the subject he is
studying, this mode of reasoning, this event, this conversation, and the
conduct of this or that man, to aid the purposes of religious
instruction. He may find an example in the manner in which Pope pursued
his favorite study. "From his attention to poetry," says Johnson, "he
was never diverted. If conversation offered any thing that could be
improved, he committed it to paper; if a thought, or perhaps an
expression more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful
to write it; an independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of
insertion, and some little fragments have been found containing lines,
or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at some other time." By a like
habitual and vigilant attention, the preacher will find scarce any thing
but may be made to minister to his great design, by either giving rise
to some new train of thought, or suggesting an argument, or placing some
truth in a new light, or furnishing some useful illustration. Thus none
of his reading will be lost; every poem and play, every treatise on
science, a