[Footnote 6:  “The custom of reading sermons,” notes Scott, “seems originally to have arisen in opposition to the practice of Dissenters, many of whom affected to trust to their Inspiration in their extempore harangues.” [T.  S.] ]

Let me entreat you, therefore, to add one half-crown a year to the article of paper; to transcribe your sermons in as large and plain a manner as you can, and either make no interlineations, or change the whole leaf; for we your hearers would rather you should be less correct than perpetually stammering, which I take to be one of the worst solecisms in rhetoric:  And lastly, read your sermon once or twice for a few days before you preach it:  to which you will probably answer some years hence, “that it was but just finished when the last bell rang to church:”  and I shall readily believe, but not excuse you.

I cannot forbear warning you in the most earnest manner against endeavouring at wit in your sermons, because by the strictest computation, it is very near a million to one that you have none; and because too many of your calling have consequently made themselves everlastingly ridiculous by attempting it.  I remember several young men in this town, who could never leave the pulpit under half a dozen conceits; and this faculty adhered to those gentlemen a longer or shorter time exactly in proportion to their several degrees of dulness:  accordingly, I am told that some of them retain it to this day.  I heartily wish the brood were at an end.

Before you enter into the common insufferable cant of taking all occasions to disparage the heathen philosophers, I hope you will differ from some of your brethren, by first enquiring what those philosophers can say for themselves.  The system of morality to be gathered out of the writings or sayings of those ancient sages, falls undoubtedly very short of that delivered in the Gospel, and wants besides, the divine sanction which our Saviour gave to His.  Whatever is further related by the evangelists, contains chiefly, matters of fact, and consequently of faith, such as the birth of Christ, His being the Messiah, His Miracles, His death, resurrection, and ascension.  None of which can properly come under the appellation of human wisdom, being intended only to make us wise unto salvation.  And therefore in this point nothing can justly be laid to the charge of the philosophers further than that they were ignorant of certain facts that happened long after their death.  But I am deceived, if a better comment could be anywhere collected, upon the moral part of the Gospel, than from the writings of those excellent men; even that divine precept of loving our enemies, is at large insisted on by Plato, who puts it, as I remember, into the mouth of Socrates.[7] And as to the reproach of heathenism, I doubt they had less of it than the corrupted Jews in whose time they lived.  For it is a gross piece of ignorance among us to conceive that in those polite and learned