I would say something concerning quotations, wherein I think you cannot be too sparing, except from Scripture, and the primitive writers of the Church.  As to the former, when you offer a text as a proof of an illustration, we your hearers expect to be fairly used, and sometimes think we have reason to complain, especially of you younger divines, which makes us fear that some of you conceive you have no more to do than to turn over a concordance, and there having found the principal word, introduce as much of the verse as will serve your turn, though in reality it makes nothing for you.  I do not altogether disapprove the manner of interweaving texts of scripture through the style of your sermons, wherein however, I have sometimes observed great instances of indiscretion and impropriety, against which I therefore venture to give you a caution.

As to quotations from ancient fathers, I think they are best brought in to confirm some opinion controverted by those who differ from us:  in other cases we give you full power to adopt the sentence for your own, rather than tell us, “as St. Austin excellently observes.”  But to mention modern writers by name, or use the phrase of “a late excellent prelate of our Church,” and the like, is altogether intolerable, and for what reason I know not, makes every rational hearer ashamed.  Of no better a stamp is your “heathen philosopher” and “famous poet,” and “Roman historian,” at least in common congregations, who will rather believe you on your own word, than on that of Plato or Homer.

I have lived to see Greek and Latin almost entirely driven out of the pulpit, for which I am heartily glad.  The frequent use of the latter was certainly a remnant of Popery which never admitted Scripture in the vulgar language; and I wonder, that practice was never accordingly objected to us by the fanatics.

The mention of quotations puts me in mind of commonplace books, which have been long in use by industrious young divines, and I hear do still continue so.  I know they are very beneficial to lawyers and physicians, because they are collections of facts or cases, whereupon a great part of their several faculties depend; of these I have seen several, but never yet any written by a clergyman; only from what I am informed, they generally are extracts of theological and moral sentences drawn from ecclesiastical and other authors, reduced under proper heads, usually begun, and perhaps finished, while the collectors were young in the church, as being intended for materials or nurseries to stock future sermons.  You will observe the wise editors of ancient authors, when they meet a sentence worthy of being distinguished, take special care to have the first word printed in capital letters, that you may not overlook it:  Such, for example, as the INCONSTANCY of FORTUNE, the GOODNESS of PEACE, the EXCELLENCY of WISDOM, the CERTAINTY of DEATH:  that PROSPERITY makes men INSOLENT, and ADVERSITY HUMBLE; and the like eternal truths, which every ploughman