knows well enough before Aristotle or Plato were born.[9] If theological commonplace books be no better filled, I think they had better be laid aside, and I could wish that men of tolerable intellectuals would rather trust their own natural reason, improved by a general conversation with books, to enlarge on points which they are supposed already to understand.  If a rational man reads an excellent author with just application, he shall find himself extremely improved, and perhaps insensibly led to imitate that author’s perfections, although in a little time he should not remember one word in the book, nor even the subject it handled:  for books give the same turn to our thoughts and way of reasoning, that good and ill company do to our behaviour and conversation; without either loading our memories, or making us even sensible of the change.  And particularly I have observed in preaching, that no men succeed better than those who trust entirely to the stock or fund of their own reason, advanced indeed, but not overlaid by commerce with books.  Whoever only reads in order to transcribe wise and shining remarks, without entering into the genius and spirit of the author, as it is probable he will make no very judicious extract, so he will be apt to trust to that collection in all his compositions, and be misled out of the regular way of thinking, in order to introduce those materials, which he has been at the pains to gather and the product of all this will be found a manifest incoherent piece of patchwork.

[Footnote 9:  Thus in first edition.  Scott and Hawkesworth have:  “though he never heard of Aristotle or Plato.” [T.S.]]

Some gentlemen abounding in their university erudition, are apt to fill their sermons with philosophical terms and notions of the metaphysical or abstracted kind, which generally have one advantage, to be equally understood by the wise, the vulgar, and the preacher himself.  I have been better entertained, and more informed by a chapter[10] in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” than by a long discourse upon the will and the intellect, and simple or complex ideas.  Others again, are fond of dilating on matter and motion, talk of the fortuitous concourse of atoms, of theories, and phenomena, directly against the advice of St Paul, who yet appears to have been conversant enough in those kinds of studies.

[Footnote 10:  Thus in first edition.  Scott and Hawkesworth have “a few pages” instead of “a chapter” [T.  S ]]

I do not find that you are anywhere directed in the canons or articles, to attempt explaining the mysteries of the Christian religion.  And indeed since Providence intended there should be mysteries, I do not see how it can be agreeable to piety, orthodoxy or good sense, to go about such a work.  For, to me there seems to be a manifest dilemma in the case if you explain them, they are mysteries no longer, if you fail, you have laboured to no purpose.  What I should think most reasonable and safe for you to do upon this occasion