THE HOSPITAL.

If you please in charity to visit an hospital, which is indeed a map of the whole world, there you shall see the effects of Adam's sin, and the ruins of human nature; bodies laid up in heaps, like the bones of a destroyed town, hominis precarii spiritus et male hærentis, men whose souls seem to be borrowed, and are kept there by art and the force of medicine, whose miseries are so great that few people have charity or humanity enough to visit them, fewer have the heart to dress them, and we pity them in civility or with a transient prayer: but we do not feel their sorrows by the mercies of a religious pity; and therefore we leave their sorrows in many degrees unrelieved and uneased. So we contract by our unmercifulness a guilt by which ourselves become liable to the same calamities. Those many that need pity, and those infinities of people that refuse to pity, are miserable upon a several charge, but yet they almost make up all mankind. Abel's blood had

a voice, and cried to God; and humanity hath a voice, and cries so loud to God that it pierces the clouds; and so hath every sorrow and every sick

ness.

* The thoughtless are averse from an interruption of their joy; reflection turns from wretchedness which it is unable to relieve. Can we ask gaiety to exchange its light pleasures for the gloom of a prison? the young tree to leave its flowers and its sweetness, or the olive its good fruit? Can we invite

ON HUMILITY.

THE other appendage of her religion, which also was a great ornament to all the parts of her life, was a rare modesty and humility of spirit, a confident despising and undervaluing of herself. For though she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest experience of things and persons that I ever yet knew in a person of her youth, and sex, and circumstances; yet, as if she knew nothing

opulence, knowing none but self-created wants, to witness the squalid poverty of him who is bereft of fortune and dis owned by friends? The industrious shun him, for he has no industry the virtuous stand afar off, for he is convicted of crime and piety, fulfilling all other christian precepts, may forget that he has a brother sick and in prison and visit him not. A. M.

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To this general apathy our country affords one glorious exception. Hearing the cry of the miserable," says Howard, "I devoted my time to their relief, and, in order to pro66 cure it, I made it my business to collect materials, the authenticity of which could not be doubted. I hope not "to be entirely deserted in the conflict: if I am the means "of exciting the attention of my countrymen to this impor"tant national concern, of alleviating the distress of prisoners of procuring them cleanly and wholesome abodes: "of exterminating the gaol fever; of introducing a habit of industry; of restraining the shocking debauchery, and im"morality which prevail in our gaols and other prisons; if

any of these beneficial consequences shall accrue, I shall "be happy in the pleasing reflection, that I have not lived "without doing some good to my fellow creatures; and I "shall think myself abundantly repaid for all the pains I "have taken, the time I have spent, and the hazards I have "encountered."

of it, she had the meanest opinion of herself; and like a fair taper, when she shined to all the room, yet round about her own station she had cast a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to every body but herself.*

It is in some circumstances and from some persons more secure to conceal visions, and those heavenly gifts which create estimations among men, than to publish them, which may possibly minister to vanity; and those exterior graces may do God's work, though no observer note them but the person for whose sake they are sent like rain falling in uninhabited valleys, where no eye observes showers; yet the valleys laugh and sing to God in their refreshment without a witness.t

All the world, all that we are, and all that we have, our bodies and our souls, our actions and our sufferings, our conditions at home, our accidents abroad, our many sins, and our seldom virtues, are as so many arguments to make our souls dwell low in the deep valleys of humility.

• Sermon on the Death of Lady Carbery.

+ Life of Christ.

Holy Living; chap. 2, § iv.

Bishop Taylor, in his preface to Holy Dying, says"I shall measure the success of my labors, not by popular noises, or the sentences of curious persons, but by the advantage which good people may receive. My work here is not to please the speculative part of men, but to minister to practice, to preach to the weary, to comfort the sick, to assist the penitent, to reprove the confident, to strengthen weak hands and feeble knees, having scarce any other possibilities

left me of doing alms, or exercising that charity by which we shall be judged at doomsday. It is enough for me to be an under-builder in the house of God, and I glory in the employment. I labour in the foundations; and therefore the work needs no apology for being plain, so it be strong and well laid." And to the same effect Locke in his Epistle to the Reader prefixed to his Essay on the Understanding, says— "The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity. But every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters, as the great Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain; 'tis ambition enough to be * Sermon xxii. p. 161,

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.

By the use of the tongue, God hath distinguished us from beasts, and by the well or ill using it we are distinguished from one another; and therefore though silence be innocent as death, harmless as a rose's breath to a distant passenger, yet it is rather the state of death than life. By voices and homilies, by questions and answers, by narratives and invectives, by counsel and reproof, by praises and hymns, by prayers and glorifications, we serve God's glory, and the necessities of men; and by the tongue our tables are made to differ from mangers, our cities from deserts, our churches from herds of beasts, and flocks of sheep.

TALKING TOO MUCH.

I HAVE heard that all the noises and prating of the pool, the croaking of frogs and toads, is

employed as an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge." And to the same effect Dr. Rawley speaking of Lord Bacon in the preface to the Sylva Sylvarum, says— I have heard his Lordship speak complainingly; that his Lordship (who thinketh he deserveth to be an architect in this building), should be forced to be a workman and a labourer; and to dig the clay and burn the brick; and more than that (according to the hard condition of the Israelites at the latter end) to gather the straw and stubble, over all the fields, to burn the bricks withal. For he knoweth that unless he do it nothing will be done; men are so set to despise the means of their own good."