his parent, for the church, because he was A DUNCE, should apply at all, or if he should, that he should apply with success?

A man, who finds himself in a profession, for which he is conscious of his being unqualified, feels himself uneasy. He seeks refuge in amusements unbecoming his profession; and I have no doubt but that it is one reason why many clergymen are seen to take delight in unclerical occupations, that they are selected for a learned profession, without any propensity to learning, and perhaps because they were supposed to be dull of apprehension, and unfit for any thing else.

Nothing is more common, in some places, than to see clergymen devoting the greatest part of their time to hounds and horses, dressing in the extremity of the jockey's or sportman's prevailing fashion, taking the lead or acting as masters of the ceremonies at assemblies, conspicuously active at horse-races, excessively attached to cards and back-gammon, and foremost in every thing which the more serious part of their congregation considers vanity.

They may certainly amuse themselves with several of these things, and at the same time be very worthy men; but yet as these things have an appearance of levity, and lead them to associate with loose and profligate characters, they give offence, and prevent them from doing that good, for which alone their profession was instituted. No good can be done by a preacher totally destitute of authority; but authority is founded on opinion, and nothing, except vice, destroys that opinion, so effectually as the appearance of levity.

Though moderate abilities and moderate attainments, with a good heart, and a decent character, may make a very valuable parish-priest, yet I can never allow, that the study of divinity, as some seem to insinuate, requires only moderate abilities and attainments. It certainly affords scope for the greatest talents, and when intended to be carried to any considerable degree of perfection, it requires also profound and extensive erudition.

To be a Christian philosopher, a physician of the soul, it is necessary, in the first place, to have studied the Holy Scriptures with great attention; and in the second, that wonderful microcosm, the heart of man. As anatomy is

necessary to the surgeon, so is the knowledge of the passions, the temper, the propensities, and the alterations which age, prosperity, and adversity, effect in the mind, necessary to him, whose office it is to reduce those who have erred, to afford rational comfort to the afflicted, and hope to the desperate. That he may enforce the doctrines of religion, he must be an orator; he must be furnished with polite learning, and with elegant diction; he must have every assistance which a liberal education can bestow, and which long and attentive reading can obtain. And shall a parent think himself justified in selecting the weakest of his children for an office so important? He who acts so unreasonably, probably renders the child unhappy, while he insults the national religion, and that God, whom it was established to honor.

If the parent thinks he perceives in any of his boys a remarkable share of abilities, he resolves to bring him up to the law, and all his worldly-wise friends commend him for not throwing away so fine a boy by placing him in the church. Yet I am fully convinced, that no department of the law requires the noble faculties of the mind in so great perfection as the pastoral office. The law chiefly requires AUDACITY AND SOPHISTRY, to both of which the church is greatly superior. The law requires the little wisdom of this world, the wisdom of those children of the world, who are wiser in their generation than the children of light; but divinity towers above such meanness, above lawyers and their subtleties, above every other profession; for to be a divine, properJy and fully accomplished, is to be all that philosophy can give, with the addition of the purest and sublimest religion.

It would afford me much satisfaction if any thing I can say should induce the serious Christian to devote the very best of his children to the service of the God, who gave them; and not impiously to consecrate him to the service of the altar, whom, from want of parts, he thinks incapable of any useful service. I suspect that man to be insincere in his profession of Christianity who dares to insult it so grossly.

It is to be wished that the patronage of livings were

Yet while Barough-interest is the only means of obtaining preferment in the church, there is little to encourage prudent parents.

chiefly, if not entirely, in the bishops, supposing translation prohibited; for private patronage, in the present age and system of principles and manners is highly injurious to the cause of Christianity. The bishops might sometimes be misled in conferring benefices, by gratitude to their patrons; but I am sure they would, for the most part, dispose of the cure of souls, far better than esquires, who consider the living in their gift, as a mere provision for some lubberly boy educated as a fox-hunter; or who, in default of a younger son, put it up to sale, and knock it down with the hammer, like lands, tenements, goods, and chattels.

Nothing surely conduces to injure Christianity so much as a contemptible ministry; and it must of necessity be partially contemptible, when many parishes in a kingdom can exhibit individuals among the laity, more learned and more decent, than the parochial priest, their authorized guide, whom they pay, and whom they ought to revere. The misfortune originates in great measure from the mistaken, but prevailing idea, which I have here endeavored to explode, that any thing is good enough to make a parson. INTEREST, and a friend at court, are thought sufficient to supply all defect.

EVENING XIV.

ON THE PECULIAR HAPPINESS SUPPOSED TO ATTEND A LIFE OF CONTEMPLATION.

“I

NO sooner enter my library," says Heinsius, "than I bolt the door, and shut out lust, ambition, and avarice, whose mother is idleness, and whose nurse, ignorance; and taking my seat among the illustrious spirits around me, I look down with pity on the rich and great, who are strangers to such refined and exalted enjoyments."

If a life of study can produce happiness so pure as Heinsius has described; if it can exclude lust, ambition, and avarice; if it can give an elevation above the rich and great; who would not fly from the world and seize that CHIEF GOOD, in the recess of his library, which he

has vainly toiled for in the road of ambition and avarice?

But no recess is sufficiently retired, no occupation sufficiently pure, to exclude care and contamination. Man bears within his bosom, wheresoever he conceals himself, and whatsoever he does, the seeds of evils and misery.

Philosophers may describe the happiness of contemplative life, and students flatter themselves that they are out of the reach of corruption; but does experience justify a persuasion that philosophers and students are happier and more innocent than all others? A perusal of their lives will evince the truth, that it is not in man to secure himself from the assaults of passion, and the corruption of vice, by withdrawing his person from the society of the multitude. Volumes have been written on the peculiar misery of the learned, and I wish it could be asserted with truth, than on shutting the doors of their book rooms, they at the same time shut out desire, avarice, and ambition,

Men of that activity of mind which ranges through all nature and art, see more clearly, and feel more sensibly, than the common tribe whose attention is fixed on frivolity. All the objects of desire, avarice, and ambition, exhibit themselves to their eyes, in the most glowing colors, and in the most engaging forms. Their taste, cultivated and refined by continual exercise of its powers, is enabled to discover charms which escape vulgar notice. Their leisure and freedom from the ordi nary cares of life, cause their hearts to fix on what their imaginations have admired. It cannot be wondered at, therefore, if contemplative men, instead of being exempt from the tumults which disturb others, have felt themselves agitated by external things with peculiar force. Their enjoyments have been, high, their suffer ings keen, and their failings singularly deplorable.

I fear, therefore, that truth must resign those pretensions to that unmolested felicity, which students have sometimes claimed, as the privilege of their learned solitude. In common with all the sons of men they partake of misery; and they are under some peculiar circumstances, which aggravate the woe which it is their destiny to share.

To secure the happiness that is allowed to man, they must, like others, have recourse to virtue and wisdom, not merely to retreat, or to contemplation. With virtue and wisdom, I believe, their employments will be found highly conducive to a most exalted state of sublunary felicity; for their employments are pure and refined, intellectual, and even heavenly, compared with the gross delights of animal sense. He who places his happiness in gluttony and debauchery, must acknowledge, while he boasts of his pleasures, that he is renouncing the most honorable part of his nature, his reason; and that he is assimilating himself, as much as he is able, with the brutes whom he proudly disdains..

I cannot help thinking, that the Platonic philosophy, mixed, as it is, with much folly, deserves more regard than it usually receives. It tends to make man value himself on his MIND. It teaches to seek enjoyment in the exertions of the discursive faculty, and to aspire at an intellectual excellence, which, though it may never reach, invites by its beautiful appearance, to heights of improvements which it would never otherwise have attained. Platonism, when carried to extremes, like all other doctrines, terminates in nonsense; but under the regulation of reason, it leads the mind to a state of celestial enjoyment and angelic perfection.

Happy would it have been for the contemplative part of mankind, if the honors which are almost universally allowed to Epicurus, had been reserved for Plato. Christian and rational Platonism leads to the perfection of the human soul: nor should the scrupulous be ashamed of uniting with christianity, a philosophy which, in its nature and tendency, when its extremes are avoided, is all pure, all spiritual, all divine.

If the superior light of christianity had not irradiated the world, there is no philosophy which the aspirant af'ter excellence would wish to prevail in preference to Platonism, divested of its visionary eccentricities. No phi'losophy contributes so much to raise man to the exaltation which he may conceive to adorn a spiritual nature. No philosophy exalts him so much above the body, and furnishes him with ideas so congenial to all that we consider as celestial.

But common sense, and common experience, affirm,