But I must remember that my design in this paper was not so much to instruct you in your business either as a clergyman or a preacher, as to warn you against some mistakes which are obvious to the generality of mankind as well as to me; and we who are hearers, may be allowed to have some opportunities in the quality of being standers-by.  Only perhaps I may now again transgress by desiring you to express the heads of your divisions in as few and clear words as you possibly can, otherwise, I and many thousand others will never be able to retain them, nor consequently to carry away a syllable of the sermon.

I shall now mention a particular wherein your whole body will be certainly against me, and the laity almost to a man on my side.  However it came about, I cannot get over the prejudice of taking some little offence at the clergy for perpetually reading their sermons[6]; perhaps my frequent hearing of foreigners, who never made use of notes, may have added to my disgust.  And I cannot but think, that whatever is read, differs as much from what is repeated without book, as a copy does from an original.  At the same time, I am highly sensible what an extreme difficulty it would be upon you to alter this method, and that, in such a case, your sermons would be much less valuable than they are, for want of time to improve and correct them.  I would therefore gladly come to a compromise with you in this matter.  I knew a clergyman of some distinction, who appeared to deliver his sermon without looking into his notes, which when I complimented him upon, he assured me he could not repeat six lines; but his method was to write the whole sermon in a large plain hand, with all the forms of margin, paragraph, marked page, and the like; then on Sunday morning he took care to run it over five or six times, which he could do in an hour; and when he deliver’d it, by pretending to turn his face from one side to the other, he would (in his own expression) pick up the lines, and cheat his people by making them believe he had it all by heart.  He farther added, that whenever he happened by neglect to omit any of these circumstances, the vogue of the parish was, “Our doctor gave us but an indifferent sermon to-day.”  Now among us, many clergymen act too directly contrary to this method, that from a habit of saving time and paper, which they acquired at the University, they write in so diminutive a manner, with such frequent blots and interlineations, that they are hardly able to go on without perpetual hesitations or extemporary expletives:  And I desire to know what can be more inexcusable, than to see a divine and a scholar, at a loss in reading his own compositions, which it is supposed he has been preparing with much pains and thought for the instruction of his people?  The want of a little more care in this article, is the cause of much ungraceful behaviour.  You will observe some clergymen with their heads held down from the beginning to the end, within an inch of the cushion, to read what is hardly legible; which, besides the untoward manner, hinders them from making the best advantage of their voice:  others again have a trick of popping up and down every moment from their paper to the audience, like an idle school-boy on a repetition day.