t you, therefore, to add one half-crown a year to the
article of paper; to transcribe your sermons in as large and plain a
manner as you can, and either make no interlineations, or change the
whole leaf; for we your hearers would rather you should be less correct
than perpetually stammering, which I take to be one of the worst
solecisms in rhetoric: And lastly, read your sermon once or twice for a
few days before you preach it: to which you will probably answer some
years hence, "that it was but just finished when the last bell rang to
church:" and I shall readily believe, but not excuse you.

I cannot forbear warning you in the most earnest manner against
endeavouring at wit in your sermons, because by the strictest
computation, it is very near a million to one that you have none; and
because too many of your calling have consequently made themselves
everlastingly ridiculous by attempting it. I remember several young men
in this town, who could never leave the pulpit under half a dozen
conceits; and this faculty adhered to those gentlemen a longer or
shorter time exactly in proportion to their several degrees of dulness:
accordingly, I am told that some of them retain it to this day. I
heartily wish the brood were at an end.

Before you enter into the common insufferable cant of taking all
occasions to disparage the heathen philosophers, I hope you will differ
from some of your brethren, by first enquiring what those philosophers
can say for themselves. The system of morality to be gathered out of the
writings or sayings of those ancient sages, falls undoubtedly very short
of that delivered in the Gospel, and wants besides, the divine sanction
which our Saviour gave to His. Whatever is further related by the
evangelists, contains chiefly, matters of fact, and consequently of
faith, such as the birth of Christ, His being the Messiah, His Miracles,
His death, resurrection, and ascension. None of which can properly come
under the appellation of human wisdom, being intended only to make us
wise unto salvation. And therefore in this point nothing can justly be
laid to the charge of the philosophers further than that they were
ignorant of certain facts that happened long after their death. But I am
deceived, if a better comment could be anywhere collected, upon the
moral part of the Gospel, than from the writings of those excellent men;
even that divine precept of loving our enemies, is at large insisted on
by Plato, who pu