"_Answer._ Yes: three reasons. (1) To inform believers; (2) To convince false moralists; (3) To stop the mouth of the adversaries, and confound antinomians. "3. How far is it proper to mention and improve particular cases, and the experience of particular people, in funeral sermons and other discourses, to try to awaken the careless? "_Answer._ Extraordinary cases known to all may be improved--with tenderness, wisdom, avoiding the appearance of sentencing any one, and saying what we say of them in Scripture words, and with suppositions. "4. (Digression.) Whether charity and duty oblige us to say over all the dead, 'we hope they rest in Christ.' (Settled.) (A hardship) and may be omitted because not insisted on as absolutely indispensable. "6. What's the proper length of a sermon for hearers and speaker? "_Answer._ A stranger may be heard for an hour; a stated minister from 30 to 50 minutes. "7. What to do to keep within these bounds? "_Answer._ Pray, digest the point, have few heads, be not long upon them. If you have been too full upon the first, be less so upon the last. "8. When a minister hath studied a subject with design to preach on it, and is shut up in his heart and clouded in his mind at preaching time, and another text presents itself, and liberty is offered to speak from it, is it enthusiasm to do it? "_Answer._ Trial may be made, and if the preacher finds freedom and the people edification, the matter was from above. "9. Whether we may allegorize Scripture, and how far? "_Answer._ So far as the Holy Ghost hath allegorized we may safely do the same; but we must be very sparing of anything that exceeds Scripture warrant. Avoid taking historical allegorical texts to raise doctrines upon. Such texts may be brought by way of comparison or illustration of some other weighty passages which contain the doctrine plainly. "10. Societies. "_Disadvantages._ They raise a jealousy in those who do not belong to them, increase their prejudice, make them think the minister partial, and watch over the society for evil. "_Advantages._ They are scriptural, comfortable, profitable, the only means of keeping up some discipline." Such were the questions discussed, and the opinions expressed in the "Society of Ministers of the Gospel," organized, and probably founded, by Fletcher. The society was one of those innumerable results of the Revival, by which its spirit and principles were widely diffused through the Church. A generation later such associations were common amongst the Evangelical clergy. Of these the Eclectic Society, founded by John Newton and Richard Cecil in 1783, is well-known to us through the "Notes," extending from 1798 to 1814, published by Archdeacon Pratt.[8]