Distrust and diffidence in our own judgment seems to be also an important instruction to be learnt from history. How contrary to all expectation do the events therein recorded commonly turn out! How continually is the most sagacious conjecture of human penetration baffled! and yet we proceed to foretell this consequence, and to predict that event from the appearances of things under our own observation, with the same arrogant certainty as if we had never been warned by the monitory annals of successive ages.

There is scarcely one great event in history which does not, in the issue, produce effects upon which human foresight could never have calculated. The success of Augustus against his country produced peace in many distant provinces, who thus ceased to be harassed and tormented by this oppressive republic. Could this effect have been foreseen, it might have sobered the despair of Cato, and checked the vehemence of Brutus. In politics, in short, in every thing except in morals and religion, all is, to a considerable degree, uncertain. This reasoning is not meant to show that Cato ought not to have fought, but that he ought not to have desponded even after the last battle; and certainly, even upon his own principles, ought not to have killed himself. It would be departing too much from my object to apply this argument, however obvious the application, against those who were lately driven to unreasonable distrust and despair by the alarming successes of a neighbouring nation.

But all knowledge will be comparatively of little value, if we neglect self-knowledge; and of selfknowledge history and biography may be made successful vehicles. It will be to little purpose that our pupils become accurate critics on the characters of others, while they remain ignorant of themselves: for while to those who exercise a habit of self-application a book of profane history may be made an instrument of improvement in this difficult science; so without such an habit the Bible itself may, in this view, be read with little profit.

It will be to no purpose that the reader weeps over the fortitude of the Christian hero, or the constancy of the martyr, if she do not bear in mind that she herself is called to endure her own common trials with something of the same temper; if she do not bear in mind that to control irregular humours, and to submit to the daily vexations of life, will require, though in a lower degree, the exertion of the same principle, and supplication for the aid of the same Spirit which sustained the Christian hero in the trying conflicts of life, or the martyr in his agony at the stake.

May I be permitted to suggest a few instances, by way of specimen, how both sacred and common history may tend to promote self-knowledge? And let me again remind the warm admirer of suffering piety under extraordinary trials, that if she now fail in the petty occasions to which she is actually called out, she would not be likely

to have stood in those more trying occasions which excite her admiration.

While she is applauding the self-denying saint, who renounced his ease, or chose to embrace death rather than violate his duty, let her ask herself if she has never refused to submit to the paltry inconvenience of giving up her company, or even altering her dinner-hour on a Sunday, though by this trifling sacrifice her family might have been enabled to attend the public worship in the after

noon.

While she reads with horror that Belshazzar was rioting with his thousand nobles at the very moment when the Persian army was bursting through the brazen gates of Babylon, is she very sure that she herself, in an almost equally imminent moment of public danger, has not been nightly indulging in every species of dissipation?

When she is deploring the inconsistency of the human heart, while she contrasts in Mark Anthony his bravery and contempt of ease at one period, with his licentious indulgences at another; or while she laments over the intrepid soul of Cæsar, whom she had been following in his painful marches, or admiring in his contempt of death, now dissolved in dissolute pleasures with the ensnaring Queen of Egypt; let her examine whether she herself has never, though in a much lower degree, evinced something of the same inconsistency? whether she who lives, perhaps, an orderly, sober, and reasonable life during her summer residence in the country, does not plunge with little

scruple in the winter into all the most extravagant pleasures of the capital? whether she never carries about with her an accommodating kind of religion, which can be made to bend to places and seasons, to climates and customs, to times and circumstances; which takes its tincture from the fashion without, and not its habits from the principle within; which is decent with the pious, sober with the orderly, and loose with the licentious?

While she is admiring the generosity of Alexander in giving away kingdoms and provinces, let her, in order to ascertain whether she could imitate this magnanimity, take heed if she herself is daily seizing all the little occasions of doing good, which every day presents to the affluent? Her call is not to sacrifice a province; but does she sacrifice. an opera ticket? She who is not doing all the good she can under her present circumstances, would not do all she foresees she should, in imaginary ones, were her power enlarged to the extent of her wishes.

While she is inveighing with patriotic indignation, that in a neighbouring metropolis thirty theatres were open every night in time of war and public calamity, is she very clear that in a metropolis which contains only three, she was not almost constantly at one of them in time of war and public calamity also? For though, in a national view, it may make a wide difference whether there be in the capital three theatres or thirty, yet, as the same person can only go to one of them at once, it makes but little difference as to the quantum of

dissipation in the individual. She who rejoices at successful virtue in a history, or at the prosperity of a person whose interests do not interfere with her own, may exercise her self-knowledge, by examining whether she rejoices equally at the happiness of every one about her; and let her remember, she does not rejoice at it in the true sense, if she does not labour to promote it. She who glows with raptute at a virtuous character in history, should ask her own heart, whether she is equally ready to do justice to the fine qualities of her acquaintance, though she may not particularly love them; and whether she takes unfeigned pleasure in the superior talents, virtues, fame, and fortune of those whom she professes to love, though she is eclipsed by them?

In like manner, in the study of geography and natural history, the attention should be habitually turned to the goodness of Providence, who commonly adapts the various productions of climates to the peculiar wants of the respective inhabitants. To illustrate my meaning by one or two instances out of a thousand. The reader may be led to admire the considerate goodness of Providence in having caused the spiry fir, whose slender foliage does not obstruct the beams of the sun, to grow in the dreary regions of the North, whose shivering inhabitants could spare none of its scanty rays; while in the torrid zone, the palm-tree, the plantain and the banana, spread their umbrella leaves to break the almost intolerable fervours of a verti