Private Thoughts Upon Religion and a Christian Life; to which is Added the Necessity and Advantage of Frequent Communion. Volume I

STUDY and reflection are allowed to be necessary preparatives to all great pursuits. To attempt to gain by hazardous risks, what may be secured by the safe methods of a sober and laborious diligence, is both unwise and dishonest: in the annals of learning a sciolist and an empiric are characters proverbially treated with contempt; and the worth of all those systems by which states are supported, and civilization carried on, consists in their greatest possible freedom from what is empirical or capricious. But if the exercise of thought and sound judgment be thus necessary in the affairs of life, it can scarcely be less so in those which intimately regard the condition and fate of man in his eternal relations: to make him fit for immortality, must, at all events, require as much care as to render him respectable in the world; and the road to heaven is certainly not more easy to be discovered than the well-beaten path to temporal distinction.