and mellowed, manure was to be brought from a distance, weeds were to be extirpated; rain, dew, and seeds of a benign and nutritive quality were to be sought for from above. For these we must return to our Maker, and for those we must, in a great measure, have continual recourse to our own labour. We must make strong fences against the serpent and beasts of all kinds. We must break up the fallow ground' of our corruptions and wicked habits. We must be watchful against the growth of internal thorns and thistles, and against the winged flocks of vain opinions, ever ready to prey upon the good seed, if lying at all uncovered on the highway of this world. The first thing to be done in this work, is to give up our understandings to God and his world; and the next is to subdue our disorderly hearts to the dictates of that word, that our lives may be no longer a course of contradictions to ourselves, nor to the happiness we profess to seek for. Under this management the fruits of faith and obedience may be gathered in abundance, and an entrance into a celestial Paradise laid open to the bearers of these fruits.

116. What are the materials of commerce? A redundancy of staple exportations, especially manufactures. What is the life and soul of manufactures? Good, cheap. What can produce good and cheap manufactures? Industry, frugality, and probity. No art, no cunning can, for any time, give the appearances of these, where these themselves are wanting. That country, which sets up for trade on bad and dear manufactures, must sink into poverty, the sole cure, humanly speaking, for luxury and knavery. Happy curse, administered by the great physician, in a natural and necessary course of things, to a people infatuated, and incapable of any other; a people, who cannot, or will not, be made sensible, that the rest of mankind will not long continue to buy bad things at a dear rate, when they can get good ones at a cheaper.

117. What Doctor Priestly hath published concerning the attraction of water and green vegetables, operating on putrid matter, diffused through the air, ought to carry its truth and utility, into the practice of physic. To him, I believe, we owe this use of green vegetables. But as to water, it hath been a practice for ages, to set tubs of water in rooms newly painted, whereby the noxious smell, at least of the putrescent oil, bath been drawn into the water from the adjacent air. We owe this salutary attraction, as we do every other good, to the Author of nature. The water, if for any time above ground, abounds with an infinity of insects;

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and so do all classes of vegetables. Putrefaction is the food, if not the peculiar element of insects; and no vegetables can subsist or grow, without it. The various species of minute insects, I mean, as to the greater number of them, are probably necessary to a system, wherein life is, every where, subsisted by death. The insects therefore must be generated and fed; and for this purpose putrefaction must abound. How far we owe the salubrity of air, ter, and of esculent and sanative vegetables, to insects, we do not know; but, as in the main, they are not noxious, we may conclude they are useful; and the rather, because air, strongly impregnated with fiery and sulphureous exhalations, so prejudicial to human health, is probably still more noxious to the life of insects. How far plagues and other epidemic fevers, are owing to immense flights of other insects, enemies to human health and life, which devour our more friendly tribes, and burrow in our bodies, natural philosophy hath not yet been able to discover, though many ingenious writers, Huetius among the rest, have nibbled at the supposition. For my own part, purblind as I am, I cannot see why the Author of nature may not have provided, in nature itself, for the chastisement of a guilty, as well as for the nourishment of a good people. From Africa, the native climate of pestilence, such winged messengers of death may be wafted by a Sirocco, as congenial to their nature, as hurtful to ours, and to that of our little inquiline insects.

118. Our translators of the Bible have given the word grace, derived from the Latin word gratia, for the original Greek word Xapis, love, or favour, almost every where; for so grace, in their time signified, and still does, excepting in the disputes between Jesuits and Jansenists, between Calvinists and Arminians, with whom it is ignorantly made to stand for the aids of the Holy Spirit, although not more than once in twenty times it is thus to be understood in the Latin or English translations of the holy Scriptures. However, the thing contended for by the Calvinists, is clearly expressed, and fully ascertained by the words, help, strength, comfort, and more especially by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Hence hath arisen among many divines a very difficult question, about the interfering of the Holy Spirit with the moral freedom of man, which hath produced a n immensity of volumes, and is still as far from a decision as ever. As in all such arguments, the truth hath been here but little attended to, and an extreme, on either side, is maintained. On one side, it is insisted, that the Holy Ghost forces

the will, and does every thing in the elect. On the other, moral freedom is paramount, and the Holy Ghost is neutral. The word of God vouches for neither of these extravagancies, nor can its temperate and rational reader accede to the one, or the other, of these parties. So far as he knows himself, he is sensible, he can do somewhat in the work of his own salvation, and what he can, he labours to do, fairly judging, that so much is required of him, and freely exerting his little powers in the obedience, dictated to him by his faith. But whereas he soon finds himself unable to accomplish his duty, even up to his own idea of it, by his own efforts, he humbly looks out for, and supplicates superior aid. In this state of mind he is met by the Holy Spirit, and carried up above his infirmities into a more perfect state of freedom, from whence he takes a clearer view of the moral sanctions; of God and heaven on his right hand; of the devil and hell on his left; of the beauty of holiness, and the deformity of vice. Thus it is, that the truth having opened his eyes, and made him free, he emerges out of his former slavery to sin, into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. He knows what to choose, and chooses it with all his heart, the Holy Spirit adding vigour and perseverance to his choice. How far he might have been aided in the very first dawnings of his goodness, by the light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world;' or how far the Holy Spirit, in his after-progress, hath braced the nerves of his resolution, and guarded him with the shield of a lively faith against the fiery darts of the wicked;' we do not know; nor can he himself know, but by the fruits, that is, by his good deeds. One thing we do know, that, from first to last, he hath not been forced to be a good Christian, which would be the same, as forced to be free, forced to be good, solecisms too absurd to be swallowed by common sense. He was helped, not forced. God admits of no service, but that which is free. The very idea of virtue sickens at compulsion. Of Christian virtue love is the father, and light the mother. Christ hath taught this man as a rational disciple; and, therefore, can never be supposed to expect his vine instruction, on the footing of a machine. for him, and will not force his gratitude, a thing impossible in nature, and wholly repugnant to every notion of that generous virtue. God alone can draw the interfering line between divine assistance, and the moral liberty of man. We know too little of Him, and ourselves, even to see this line. Let Christian faith,

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therefore, leave it to God, as it does every other principle of religion, when it becomes mysterious, that is, when it rises above the capacity of human comprehension. Our salvation cannot be accomplished without divine assistance, for all power belongeth unto God;' nor will it ever be accomplished, without our concurrence, for we are commanded to save ourselves, and work out our salvation with fear and trembling,' for this very reason, and on this comfortable encouragement, because the Lord worketh in us both to will, and to do.' In some sense or degree the virtue of a Christian must be his own, or why is he to be made happy in consequence of it, for, in strictness, we cannot call his happiness a reward? Or, why does he, by imputation, become 'the righteousness of God in Christ,' if his goodness is all his own? Let him choose the right way, pointed out to him by the word, and let him sigh and pant after the happy end, to which it leads; for it is almost all he can do. As to power, whether natural, or adventitious, he hath none, but that which God hath given him, for God is the sole source of power. Here both the Calvinist, and Arminian may ask, why is not sufficient power afforded to all men? And I answer, that God will make no man accountable for more than the right use and improvement of what he hath given him. According as he uses or abuses his moral liberty, he stands justified through the saving merits of Christ Jesus, to which he is entitled by his faith and obedience; or condemned for his non-conformity to the will of Christ, laid open to him in the gospel. The whole controversy must resolve itself into this decision. The saving faith of a Christian, whence originates and springs all his righteousness, is so far voluntary, as it is built on historical faith; to, or from, the evidence of which a man may turn his attention. Christ hath said, to make this a clear point, this is the work of God to believe on him whom he hath sent.' Were there no choice in this fundamental degree of faith, there would be no work, no act of the mind; for the evidence to be believed, is afforded to, not produced by, the mind of the believer. It is only on this historical, and original voluntary degree of faith, that the saving and effectual faith of a true Christian is, or can be erected.

119. About the year 1765, and in summer time, several horses died in the adjacencies of Fintona, and county of Tyrone, of a disorder, at first wholly unaccountable to their owners, and the farriers. It was at length perceived, that a vast number of small

flies or insects had nestled in the nostrils of all the horses, and nowhere else; and killed some. These flies were traced, through the same sort of nidus, to a country about twenty miles north of Fintona, and no farther. I made my servant carefully pick one of them from a nostril of one of my own horses, the interior coat of which was lined all round with them. It was large enough to be very visible to the naked eye; I, however, examined it with a moderate magnifier, and found it to be a winged tick. When I was a boy, and accustomed sometimes to sit on the grass, I had observed many exactly such, the wings excepted, which would fasten on my skin, when they could get at it, to suck my blood. The wings of this fly were very small, transparent, and almost circular, sufficient however for the flight of so minute a body when empty, but not to buoy up the tenth part of its weight when brought to me, for its body was then swollen to the size of a middling pin's head with the horse's blood, which shewed its redness, but little diluted, through the transparent skin of the creature's belly. I cured my horses immediately with a mixture of tansy tea, tar, and flour of sulphur, rubbed twice a day into the nostrils of my horses with a brush of hogs' bristles. It was the same composition, with which I had formerly directed them to be well rubbed under the tails, to defend them from the bot-fly in August. As this tick is an animalcule, not taken notice of, that I remember, by any of our naturalists, I thought it not amiss to give some account of it in this farrago of things, especially as it is, and may again be, destructive to one of the noblest and most useful animals of the brute creation. I should have used the juice, rather than a decoction of tansy, as more operative; but I chose to use this herb as a celebrated anthelminthic, and because our flies and insects, of all sorts, seem to avoid it. Whether it produces any sorts of its own, is more than I can pretend to say. If it does, they possibly may be avoided as vermin, noxious to the inhabitants of other plants.

120. If they were Christians (they could be such only in name), who stoned to death Telemachus in the circus for endeavouring to dissuade the gladiators from butchering one another, the remaining people of Sorento were really such, who, when the Turks had sacked their city, and carried off ten thousand of the inhabitants, sold all they had left, and ransomed their fellow-citizens, after the then king of Naples, or the viceroy, had refused the sum demanded. This glorious act of philanthropy happened but about two hundred and thirty years ago.