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1029. The People.-The greatest scholars, poets, orators, philosophers, warriors, statesmen, inventors and improvers of the arts, arose from the lowest of the people. If we had waited till courtiers had invented the art of printing, clock-making, navigation, and a thousand others, we should probably have continued in darkness to this hour. They had something else to do, than to add to the comforts and conveniences of ordinary life. They had to worship an idol with the incense of flattery, who was often much more stupid than themselves, and who sometimes had no more care or knowledge of the people under him, or their wants, than he had of arts or literature.-Knox's Spirit of Despotism.

1030. Humanity.-Humanity is, in regard to the other social affections, what the first lay of colours is in respect to a picture. It is a ground on which are painted the different kinds of love, friendship, and engage

ment.

As the ancients held those places sacred, which were blasted with lightning, we ought to pay a tender regard to those persons who are visited with affliction.

A general civility is due to all mankind; but an extraordinary humanity and a peculiar delicacy of good breeding is owing to the distressed, that we may not add to their affliction by any seeming neglect.—Anon.

1031. Self love.-Self-love is the earliest principle, and universal in its influence. This is always operative, in a greater or less degree, in every sentient being, from the dawn of his existence to the termination of his days.

Self-love may operate not only to the exclusion, but to the injury, of another. The social affection adopts others into our hearts; and in proportion to the strength of our attachments, will the affections approximate to self-love, and influence our conduct.

Self-love is not, in its own nature, either a good or an evil, a virtuous or a vicious principle. It is solely a propensity to possess whatever we suppose to be good for us, or gratifying to our nature. It is operative where virtue and vice have no concern. Its irregular operations are obvious in vice; while its temperate, well regulated influence is obvious in all the personal virtues.-Cogan's Ethical Questions.

1032. Reason.-What is that reason of which we boast so triumphantly? It bears nothing more than the relation of objects to our wants; it is reduced to mere personal interest.

Hence it is, that we have so many family reasons, reasons of association, reasons of state, reasons of all countries and of all ages. Hence it is, that the reason of a young man, is not that of an old man. The reason of a woman differs from that of a hermit; and the reason of a soldier, from that of a priest.-St. Pierre.

1033. Insensibility.-It is the fate of mankind, too often, to seem insensible of what they may enjoy at the easiest rate.-Sterne's Sermons.

1034. War.-War, though it may be undertaken, according to popular opinions and popular language, with justice, and prosecuted with success, is a most awful calamity: it generally finds men sinners, or makes them such; for, so great is usually the disproportion between the provocation and the punishment, between the evil inflicted or suffered, and the good obtained, or even proposed, that a serious man cannot reconcile the very frequent rise, and the very long continuance of hostilities, to reason or to humanity. Upon whom, too, do the severities of war fall most heavily? In many cases, they by whom contention is begun, or cherished, feel their influence extended, their dependants multiplied, and their wealth, in the regular and fair course of public business, increased. While fields are laid waste, and cities depopulated, the persons by whose commands such miseries take place are often wantoning in luxurious excess, or slumbering in a state of unfeeling and lazy repose. The peaceful citizen is in the mean time crushed under the weight of exaction, to which, for "conscience sake,” he submits; the industrious merchant is impoverished by unforeseen and undeserved losses; and the artless husbandman is dragged away from those who are nearest and dearest to him, in order to shed the blood of beings as innocent and as wretched as himself, to repel injuries which he never felt or suspected, and to procure advantages which he may never understand or enjoy. Such are the aggravating circumstances belonging to war, when it is carried on against a foreign enemy; and though it be disarmed of many terrors which accompanied it in less enlightened and less civilized ages.

Parr's Discourse on the late Fast.

1035. Suppressing Opinions. It is impossible to subdue the human mind by making war against opinions: it may succeed for a season, but the end thereof is death. Milton has truly said that a forbidden book is a spark of truth that flies up in the face of him who seeks to tread it out, and that a government which seeks its safety in the suppression of the Press, by sanguinary penalties, is like the gentleman who heightened the wall of his park to keep out the crows. The human mind cannot be imprisoned, it is impressive and immortal. Reform the abuses which obscure the constitution and we will answer for its safety. Statesmen have in all ages distracted governments by their ambition; parties will always create animosities, and sometimes confusion, by their discordant interests; tumults will occasionally arise out of the best of human passions, in the best ordered states; but where an enlightened and faithful administration of justice exist in any country, that country may be said to be secure.-Anon.

1036. Clergymen expose the kingdom of heaven to sale, that with the money they may purchase as much as they can in this world; and therefore they extol and magnify the one, as all chapmen do a commodity they wish to part with, and cry down the other, as all buyers are wont to do that which they have the greatest longing to purchase, only to bring down the price, and gain the better bargain by it. And yet in the general the world goes on still as it used to do; and men will never utterly give over the other world for this, nor this for the other.-Butler.

1037. On Free Will.-The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principles of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?

But, you will say, "I feel free." This is an illusion, that may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, lighting upon the pole of a heavy carriage applauded himself for directing its course. Man who thinks himself free, is a fly, who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly carried along by it.-Le Bon Sens.

1038. Despotism. He that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read but the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced of the contrary. He that would have been insolent and injurious in the woods of America, would not probably be much better in a throne, where perhaps learning and religion shall be found out to justify all that he shall do to his subjects, and the sword presently silence all those that dare question it: for what the protection of absolute monarchy is, what kind of fathers of their countries it makes princes to be, and to what a degree of happiness and security it carries civil society, where this sort of government is grown to perfection, he, that will look into the late relation of Ceylon may easily see.

Locke on Government.

1039. Particular parts of the Bible not to be read by Children.There should be a wise conduct in shewing children what parts of the Bible they should read: for though the word of God expresseth all things with due decency, yet there are some things which have been found necessary to be spoken of in scripture, both in the laws of Moses, and in the representation of the wickedness of the Gentiles in the New Testament, in which adult persons have been concerned, which there is no necessity for children to read and hear, and they may be passed over or omitted among them. The Jews were wont to withhold Solomon's Song from their children till they were thirty years old: and the late pious and prudent bishop Tillotson, (in a manuscript which I have seen) wishes that those parts of the Bible wherein there are some of the affairs of mankind expressed "too naturally" (as he calls it) were omitted in the public lessons of the church: I think they may as well be excepted also out of the common lessons of children, and out of the daily course of reading in family worship.-Watts's Posthumous Works.

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1040. On Education.—The difference betwixt the ancients and ourselves seems to be, that the point at which they aimed in their education was to form men only; we fit them to be schoolmasters, born to conjugate rather than to conquer-with whom the laws of grammar take place of all other laws, whether of peace or war. We fix upon a course of instruction, which can answer no human purpose to one in a hundred by whom it is pursued: a practice which was unknown, and would have been ridiculed by the very people to whose language and learning we pay this extravagant compliment. We have really no objection to Greek and Latin, if the study of them is referred to their proper places-give us the necessaries of life first, and then as many of its luxuries as you like. If we must be decked in gold lace, top-knots, and bag wigs, at least, give us necessary clothing, shirts and coats to our backs, and shoes to run about in. We repeat it, that had the practice in education been what it ought to be, to postpone mere ornament to utility, and to make the chief object in requisition the first of acquisition, the objections that have been made to the general instruction of the people, never could have been put forth with the air of plausibility they have been. In dwelling upon this subject, we feel that we must seem occasionally to verge upon two contrary confines; much of what we say will appear so obvious in theory that it is little better than truism; and yet is at the same time, so removed from ordinary practice, as to assume the air of paradox. We have gone on so long in dedicating the whole of our younger days to the exclusive study of the dead languages, that to call for the reason of it seems like questioning a first principle in morals. If the utility of Greek and Latin grammar has been ever doubted for a moment, it has still been replied, but "what then consider it only as a discipline for the mind, and it will be found the most salutary and valuable of all the studies that could employ our earlier years." Now the obvious answer to this is, that the Greeks and Romans themselves most assuredly had no such discipline-had no notion whatever of the latent virtue of pronoun and spondee. The most discursive of their sages, in all their speculations about the " summum bonum," had not found out that it was gram

mar. Ignorant and benighted pagans that they were! they discoursed of the happiness of a state in which man should be taught the government of his passions: the more sublime felicity, where the noun shall govern the verb, they dreamed not of. In short, with all their vaunted wisdom, it must be confessed, that they had no conception of the good of devoting ten years of their life to the study of a dead tongue. The only language they deigned to study was their own; and that, to be sure, was studied zealously and rightly in the volumes of their own writers. In speaking, in writing, in reading, in hearing, they would have thought it as wise to pore over the elements of mere grammar for those whose business it was to apply and illustrate its rules by practice, as for an architect, when called upon to build an edifice of brick and stone, to spend his time in chemical analysis of the materials which were ready for his use, in investigating the nature of clay or dissolving the elements of marble.

London University Magazine.

1041. Ignorance.-Survey our faults, our errors, our vices—fearful and fertile field, trace them to their causes, all those causes resolve themselves into one-ignorance! For as from this source flow the abuses of religion, so also from this source flow the abuses of all other blessings, of talents, of riches, of power; for we abuse things, either because we know not their real use, or because, with an equal blindness, we imagine the abuse more adapted to our happiness. But as ignorance, then, is the sole spring of evil, so, as the antidote to ignorance is knowledge, it necessarily follows, that were we consummate in knowledge, we should be perfect in good. He therefore who retards the progress of intellect, countenances crime-nay, to a state, is the greatest of criminals; whilst he who circulates that mental light, more precious than the visual, is the holiest improver, and the surest benefactor of his race! Nor let us believe, with the dupes of a shallow policy, that there exists upon earth one prejudice which can be called salutary, or one error beneficial to perpetuate.-E. L. Bulwer.

1042. Drunkenness.-It were better for a man to be subject to any vice, than to drunkenness: for all other vanities and sins are recovered, but a drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness; for the longer it possesseth a man, the more he will delight in it, and the elder he groweth the more he shall be subject to it; for it dulleth the spirits, and destroyeth the body as ivy doth the old tree; or as the worm ingendereth in the kernel of the nut.-Sir W. Raleigh.

1043. Industry.—Industry is not only the instrument of improvement, but the foundation of pleasure. He who is a stranger to it may possess but cannot enjoy: for it is labour only which gives relish to pleasure. It is the appointed vehicle of every good to man. It is the indispensable condition of possessing a sound mind in a sound body.—Dr. Blair.

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