that their merit confifts not in an affiduous compliance with our humours and caprices, but in a strict and uniform difcharge of the duties of their station, we prevent much of their influence on the minds of children. By example as well as precept, we should teach children to accept of their fervices, where they are called for, with thankfulness: never to speak to them in the haughty tone of arrogant authority; never wantonly to exercise their patience by keeping them waiting for our pleafure; and never to make their perfonal defects, or even that ignorance which is lefs their fault than their misfortune, the subject of ridicule. By our care of their health, and attention to them in sickness, in which the children fhould, if the disease be not infectious, learn to affift us, they will be taught the duties of humanity. By the care they fee us bestow on their religious inftruction, they will receive leffons of its importance; and by our utter reprobation of every

in

stance

stance of falfhood or equivocation, which fhould be followed by immediate dismission from our fervice, they will attach to a departure from truth ideas of irremediable difgrace.

Thus may the treatment we give our fervants be made an instrument of inftruction; at the fame time that children, without being taught to avoid them as infectious, may be made to find so much greater inducements to our fociety as to be in no danger of preferring theirs. To effect this we should never fail to give the nurserymaid fuch full employment at her needle as will leave her little time to join either in their fports, or in their converfation. The sooner they learn to take care of themfelves the better; it is fufficient that all instruments of mischief, and all that is too precious, or too brittle for their handling, should be removed; and then let them invent work, and amusement for themselves. I could fay much more on this subject, but

here

here all my ideas have been anticipated, and fo ably and elegantly expreffed, by the fenfible author of Practical Education, that it would be prefumption in me to attempt further elucidation. (D) Adieu.

.V

LETTER

LETTER V.

RELIGION.

HA

AVING taken a view, a flight and imperfect view we must acknowledge, of thofe early and powerful affociations which are derived from strong and vivid impreffions, we come next to confider thofe that are gradually fixed in the mind by frequent repetition.

To this fecond clafs we have referred all affociations of the pleasurable kind. Of thofe, I well know the friend to whom I addrefs myself will agree with me in thinking that devotional fentiment ought to take the lead; and were thefe Letters intended for your exclusive perufal, I should proceed without

without hesitation or apology. But at a time when infidelity and enthusiasm so much abound. When all who are not infidels are denominated enthusiasts by one party, and all who are not enthusiasts are claffed with infidels by the other, it may be neceffary to affure the reader that I am remote from either.

I have no wish to make converts to any particular creed; but I have an earnest, a zealous with that all who are fully convinced of the truth of the Gofpel would' unite in brotherly love and pure affection; being fully perfuaded, that were the truc fpirit of chriftian charity to become, as it ought, the diftinguifhing characteristic of the chriftian church, the fhafts of infidelity would fall harmlefs to the ground. Variety of opinion is the inevitable confe quence of that variety of intellect which GOD has been pleafed to bestow on inankind. In the infinite variety that appears to the human countenance, every pious perfon