onal hearer ashamed. Of no
better a stamp is your "heathen philosopher" and "famous poet," and
"Roman historian," at least in common congregations, who will rather
believe you on your own word, than on that of Plato or Homer.

I have lived to see Greek and Latin almost entirely driven out of the
pulpit, for which I am heartily glad. The frequent use of the latter was
certainly a remnant of Popery which never admitted Scripture in the
vulgar language; and I wonder, that practice was never accordingly
objected to us by the fanatics.

The mention of quotations puts me in mind of commonplace books, which
have been long in use by industrious young divines, and I hear do still
continue so. I know they are very beneficial to lawyers and physicians,
because they are collections of facts or cases, whereupon a great part
of their several faculties depend; of these I have seen several, but
never yet any written by a clergyman; only from what I am informed, they
generally are extracts of theological and moral sentences drawn from
ecclesiastical and other authors, reduced under proper heads, usually
begun, and perhaps finished, while the collectors were young in the
church, as being intended for materials or nurseries to stock future
sermons. You will observe the wise editors of ancient authors, when they
meet a sentence worthy of being distinguished, take special care to have
the first word printed in capital letters, that you may not overlook it:
Such, for example, as the INCONSTANCY of FORTUNE, the GOODNESS of PEACE,
the EXCELLENCY of WISDOM, the CERTAINTY of DEATH: that PROSPERITY makes
men INSOLENT, and ADVERSITY HUMBLE; and the like eternal truths, which
every ploughman knows well enough before Aristotle or Plato were
born.[9] If theological commonplace books be no better filled, I think
they had better be laid aside, and I could wish that men of tolerable
intellectuals would rather trust their own natural reason, improved by a
general conversation with books, to enlarge on points which they are
supposed already to understand. If a rational man reads an excellent
author with just application, he shall find himself extremely improved,
and perhaps insensibly led to imitate that author's perfections,
although in a little time he should not remember one word in the book,
nor even the subject it handled: for books give the same turn to our
thoughts and way of reasoning, that good and ill company do to our
behaviour and conversati