86. THE VANITY OF LEARNING.

To be ambitious of distinction in the world, is a commendable quality, when it excites men to the performance of illustrious actions, for the benefit of human kind. But for the pleasure of being lifted up, for a moment, above the common level of mankind,—of being made a spectacle for silly people to admire and applaud,-of having his ears stunned with the senseless noise of popularity, many a man has forfeited his character with the wise and good, and inflicted wounds on his conscience which the balm of flattering dependents can never heal.

The love of learning itself is not to be gratified beyond a certain limit; it must not be indulged to the injury of your health, nor to the hindrance of your virtue of that virtue which is employed in discharging the duties of your station with firmness and activity. What will the fame derived from the most profound learning avail you, if you have not learned to be pious, and humble, and temperate, and charitable? Your wisdom is nothing worth, unless you are wise in working out your own salvation: your researches into the depths of philosophy are but the triflings of an idle mind, unless they teach you to search out God, to adore his inscrutable perfections, and to regulate all your conduct in obedience to his will. If the condition of. your parents is such as enables them to give you a learned education, it will be a shame for you to disappoint their hopes by idleness and profligacy. You must use diligence in acquiring all the knowledge you can of such branches of study as you shall be directed to cultivate; but you must not suffer the praises you hear bestowed on learning, to induce you to believe that there is nothing more excellent as a qualification; for piety is more excellent; so is benevolence; so is sobriety; so is every virtue which adorns a Christian. You must not let your knowledge puff you up with vanity; for there can be no cause for your presumption. You may know a little more than those who have not been instructed as well as you have been, or than those whom God has not favored with as good talents as he has given you; but those who know the most of any subject, know so little of it, that their knowledge is, to them, only a more convincing proof than other men have, of the great and general weakness of the human understanding. If your knowledge produces that reflection in you, instead of vanity, its fruit will be humility; and if it does not produce it, it deceives you. BISHOP WATSON.

87. THE MISERIES OF WAR.

THE stoutest heart in this assembly would recoil, were he who owns it to behold the destruction of a single individual by some deed of violence. Were the man who, at this moment, stands before you, in the full play and energy of health, to be, in another moment, laid, by some deadly aim, a lifeless corpse at your feet, there is not one of you who would not prove how strong are the relentings of nature at a spectacle so hideous as death. There are some of you who would be haunted, for whole days, by the image of horror you had witnessed; who would feel the weight of a most oppressive sensation upon your heart, which nothing but time could wear away; who would be so pursued by it, as to be unfit for business or for enjoyment; who would think of it through the day, and it would spread a gloomy disquietude over your waking moments; who would dream of it at night, and it would turn that bed, which you courted as a retreat from the torments of an ever-meddling memory, into a scene of restlessness.

Oh, tell me, if there be any relentings of pity in your bosom, how could you endure it, to behold the agonies of the dying man, as, goaded by pain, he grasps the cold ground in convulsive energy; or, faint with the loss of blood, his pulse ebbs low, and the gathering paleness spreads itself over his countenance; or, wrapping himself round in despair, he can only mark, by a few feeble quiverings, that life still lurks and lingers in his lacerated body; or, lifting up a faded eye, he casts on you a look of imploring helplessness for that succor which no sympathy can yield him? It may be painful to dwell thus, in imagination, on the distressing picture of one individual; but, multiply it ten thousand times; say how much of all this distress has been heaped together on a single field; give us the arithmetic of this accumulated wretchedness, and lay it before us, with all the accuracy of an official computation, and, strange to tell, not one sigh is lifted up among the crowd of eager listeners, as they stand on tiptoe, and catch every syllable of utterance which is read to them out of the registers of death. Oh! say, what mystic spell is that which so blinds us to the suffering of our brethren; which deafens to our ear the voice of bleeding humanity, when it is aggravated by the shriek of dying thousands; which makes the very magnitude of the slaughter throw a softening disguise over its cruelties and its horrors; which causes us to eye, with indifference, the field that is

crowded with the most revolting abominations, and arrests that sigh which each individual would, singly, have drawn from us, by the report of the many who have fallen and breathed their last in agony along with him?

DR. CHALMERS.

88. THE BENEVOLENCE OF GOD.

It is saying much for the benevolence of God, to say, that it sends forth wide and distant emanations over the surface of a territory so ample, that the world we inhabit, lying imbedded, as it does, amidst so much surrounding greatness, shrinks into a point, that, to the Universal Eye, might appear to be almost imperceptible. But, does it not add to the power and to the perfection of this Universal Eye, that, at the very moment it is taking a comprehensive survey of the vast, it can fasten a steady and undistracted attention on each minute and separate portion of it; that, at the very moment it is looking at all worlds, it can look most pointedly and most intelligently to each of them; that, at the very moment it sweeps the field of immensity, it can settle all the earnestness of its regards upon every distinct hand breadth of that field; that, at the very moment at which it embraces the totality of existence, it can send a most thorough and penetrating inspection into each of its details, and into every one of its endless diversities? You cannot fail to perceive how much this adds to the power of the All-seeing Eye. Tell me, then, if it do not add as much perfection to the benevolence of God, that, while it is expatiating over the vast field of created things, there is not one portion of the field overlooked by it; that, while it scatters blessings over the whole of an infinite range, it causes them to descend, in a shower of plenty, on every separate habitation; that, while his arm is underneath and round about all worlds, he enters within the precincts of every one of them, and gives a care and a tenderness to each individual of their teeming population? Oh! does not the God, who is said to be love, shed over this attribute of his its finest illustration, when, while he sits in the highest heaven, and pours out his fulness on the whole subordinate domain of nature and of providence, he bows a pitying regard on the very humblest of his children, and sends his reviving Spirit into every heart, and cheers, by his presence, every home, and provides for the wants of every family, and watches every sick

bed, and listens to the complaints of every sufferer! And while, by his wondrous mind, the weight of universal government is borne, oh! is it not more wondrous and more excellent still, that he feels for every sorrow, and has an ear open to every prayer!

DR. CHALMERS.

89. THE POWER OF TEMPTATION.

WHO has not felt the workings of a rivalry within him, between the power of conscience and the power of temptation? Who does not remember those seasons of retirement, when the calculations of eternity had gotten a momentary command over the heart, and time, with all its interests, and all its vexations, had dwindled into insignificancy before them? Oh! how comes it that, in the face of experience, the whole elevation of purpose, conceived in this hour of better understanding, should be dissipated and forgotten? Who is it that so pictures out the objects of sense, and so magnifies the range of their future enjoyment, and so dazzles the fond and deceived imagination, that, in looking onward through our earthly career, it appears like the vista or the perspective of innumerable ages? He, who is called the god of this world. He, who can dress the idleness of its waking dreams in the garb of reality. He, who can pour a seducing brilliancy over the panorama of its fleeting pleasures and its vain anticipations. He, who can turn it into an instrument of deceitfulness, and make it wield such an absolute ascendency over all the affections, that man becomes the poor slave of its idolatries and its charms puts the authority of conscience, and the warnings of the word of God, and the offered instigations of the Spirit of God, and all the lessons of calculation, and all the wisdom even of his own sound and sober experience away from him. DR. CHALMERS.

90. SPEECH OF CAIUS MARIUS.

I SUBMIT to your judgment, Romans, on which side the advantage lies, when a comparison is made between patrician haughtiness and plebeian experience. The very actions, which they have only read, I have partly seen, and partly myself achieved. What they know by reading, I know by action. They are pleased to slight my mean birth; I despise their mean

characters. Want of birth and fortune is the objection against me; want of personal worth against them. But are not all men of the same species? What can make a difference between one man and another, but the endowments of the mind? For my part, I shall always look upon the bravest man as the noblest man. If the patricians have reason to despise me, let them likewise despise their ancestors, whose nobility was the fruit of their virtue. Do they envy the honors bestowed upon me? Let them envy, likewise, my labors, my abstinence, and the dangers I have undergone for my country, by which I have acquired them. But those worthless men lead such a life of inactivity, as if they despised any honors you can bestow, whilst they aspire to honors as if they had deserved them by the most industrious virtue. They lay claim to the rewards of activity, for their having enjoyed the pleasures of luxury; yet none can be more lavish than they are in the praise of their ancestors and they imagine they honor themselves by celebrating their forefathers; whereas they do the very contrary; for, as much as their ancestors were distinguished for their virtues, so much are they disgraced by their vices. The glory of ancestors casts a light, indeed, upon their posterity; but it only serves to show what the descendants are. It alike exhibits to public view their degeneracy and their worth. I own, I cannot boast of the deeds of my forefathers; but I hope I may answer the cavils of the patricians, by standing up in defence of what I have myself done.

Observe, now, my countrymen, the injustice of the patricians. They arrogate to themselves honors, on account of the exploits done by their forefathers; whilst they will not allow me the due praise, for performing the very sort of actions in my own person. He has no statues, they cry, of his family. He can trace no venerable line of ancestors. What then? Is it matter of more praise to disgrace one's illustrious ancestors, than to become illustrious by one's own good behavior? What if I can show no statues of my family? I can show the standards, the armor, and the trappings which I have myself taken from the vanquished: I can show the scars of those wounds which I have received by facing the enemies of my country. These are my statues. These are the honors I boast of. Not left me by inheritance, as theirs; but earned by toil, by abstinence, by valor; amidst clouds of dust and seas of blood: scenes of action, where those effeminate patricians who endeavor, by indirect means, to depreciate me in vour esteem, have never dared to show their faces.

SALLUST