for, but as one who had deigned to reveal his will to man, and given his only Son as a propitiation for transgression, and as an example of perfection, through whose mediation they were alone to look for salvation.

The Scriptures were explained to them, so far as a finite and imperfect being may or can be supposed to comprehend the ordinations of infinite wisdom.

Morland on one occasion said to his father, that it was impossible for him to believe that which he did not understand; on which the astonished parent, who pretended to no more theology than what his own observation of nature and experience had taught him, asked his son what he did understand. "Do you believe that you exist, and that you can move your foot?" he continued: to which Morland replied in the affirmative. "Then pray tell me how it is you exist, and why your foot moves at the command of your inclination; how life is given to a worm, or foliage to the trees; why that

blade of grass withers and another springs up? Can your understanding decypher how the sun,

the moon, and stars were formed, how they are poised in the planetary system, how this great earth of our's is put in motion, and wheels round with the mighty oceans clinging to its sides? That these things are, is certain; but why they are, we know not. It is true that men occasionally discover what they term laws, by which certain phenomena are governed; such attempts do honour to human reason: but it is profanation to speak of the efforts and ingenuity of the wisest man, in comparison with the immutable works and laws of God. No words can express, no thoughts conceive, our utter insignificance under such a comparison."

These conversations produced a salutary effect, and Morland had ample opportunities of proving their truth in his passage through life, where his deepest researches convinced him how little it was in the power of man to know, and made him look with awe on the Creator of

such stupendous and incomprehensible works. But to conclude our remarks on their moral and intellectual discipline, their education was carried on, not as perfecting them in any one science, but storing the mind with facts which left it free to use them with advantage in afterlife.

CHAPTER III.

Latin I grant, and college breeding,
And some school commonplace of reading.

LLOYD.

CONTRARY to the usual custom of developing character progressively, it is considered more in unison with the design of this book, to sketch at once a few of the persons connected with the history contained in it.

Although Mr. Dunstanville's habits had become so retired that his visitors were few, yet he was not only well known but highly respected by all classes of inhabitants in the neighbourhood. His chief companion was Mr. Felix Barnes, the tutor to his boys and curate of the parish. Mr. Barnes was a man of extensive information, and more kind and bene

volent than his peculiar manners seemed to indicate. He had been so much accustomed to

college and literary society, that the conversation of men of fashion, and the gossip of the day, was a downright bore to him; and in return, he was considered one of that brutal species, by all those who delighted not in the derivation of words, the properties of a triangle, the beauties of botany, or the merits of the hot Huttonian, or wet Wernerian theories. Indeed, it was astonishing with what agrimonia, dodecandria, digynia, and other enormous weapons he used to pull to pieces the beauties of a little flower; not to say a word of the facility with which he shivered the scapula of the very globe itself into fragments of primitive rocks, secondary formations, and alluvial deposits.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mr. Barnes should be laughed at by the many, for making use of abstruse terms to explain simple subjects; but he consoled himself with a motto from Swift: