in it, because it informs your Judgments, and furnishes Materials for your thoughts to work on; and you love your Religion and make it your Choice because you understand it; the only Conquest you now design and lay out your care to obtain is over Vice and Prophaneness; you study to engage men in the love of true Piety and Goodness, and no farther to be Lovers of your selves than as you are the most amiable and illustrious examples of ’em; you find your Wit has lost nothing of its salt and agreeableness by being employ’d about its proper business, the exposing Folly; your Raillery is not a whit less pleasant for being more Charitable, and you can render Vice as ridiculous as you please, without exposing those unhappy Persons who’re guilty of it; your Humour abates not of its innocent gaity now that it is more upon the Guard, for you know very well that true Joy is a sedate and solid thing, a tranquility of mind, not a boisterous and empty flash; Instead of Creditors your doors are fill’d with indigent Petitioners who don’t so often go without your Bounty as the other us’d to do without their just demands; nor are you unjust to some under colour of being Charitable to others, and when you give Liberally, give no more than what is lawfully your own. You disdain the base ungenerous Practice of pretending Kindness where you really mean none; and of making a poor Country Lady less instructed in the formalities of the Town than your selves, pay sufficiently for your seeming Civility and kind Entertainment by becoming the Subject of your mirth and diversion as soon as she is gone; but one may now pretty securely relie on your Sincerity, for when this lower sort of Treachery is abhorr’d, there can certainly be no place for that more abominable one of betraying and seducing unwary Innocence. I do not question Ladies but that this is the Practice of the greatest number of you, and would be of all the rest were it not for some little discouragments they meet with, which really are not so great as their own modesty and diffidence of themselves represent ’em. They think they’ve been bred up in Idleness and Impertinence, and study will be irksome to them, who have never employ’d their mind to any good purpose, and now when they wou’d they want the method of doing it; they know not how to look into their Souls, or if they do, they find so many disorders to be rectified, so many wants to be supplied, that frighted with the difficulty of the work they lay aside the thoughts of undertaking it. They have been barbarously us’d, their Education and greatest Concerns neglected, whilst their imprudent Parents and Guardians were busied in managing their Fortunes and regulating their Mien; who so their Purse was full and their outside plausible, matter’d not much the poverty and narrowness of their minds, have taught them perhaps to repeat their Catechism and a few good Sentences, to read a Chapter and _say_