"It is true, indeed, one article of impeachment was, that 'some of them were of _trades_ before they entered into the university.' But what evil or crime worthy of expulsion can there be in that? To be called from any, though the meanest mechanical employment, to the study of the liberal arts, where a natural genius hath been given, was never yet looked upon as a reproach to, or diminution of any great and public character whatsoever. Profane history affords us a variety of examples of the greatest heroes, who have been fetched even from the plough to command armies, and who performed the greatest exploits for their country's good. And if we examine _sacred_ history, we shall find that even David, after he was anointed king, looked back with sweet complacency to the rock from whence he was hewn, and is not ashamed to leave it upon record, that God took him away from the sheepfolds, as he was following the ewes great with young; and, as though he loved to repeat it, he took him, he says, 'that he might feed Jacob his people, and Israel his inheritance.' "But why speak I of David, when Jesus of Nazareth, David's Lord and David's King, had for his reputed father a carpenter? and in all probability, as it was a common proverb among the Jews, that 'he who did not teach his son a trade, taught him to be a thief,' he worked at the trade of a carpenter himself. For this, indeed, he was reproached and maligned: 'Is not this,' said they, 'the carpenter's son?' Nay, 'Is not this the carpenter?' But who were these maligners? The greatest enemies to the power of godliness which the world ever saw, the scribes and Pharisees, that 'generation of vipers,' as John the Baptist calls them, who, upon every occasion, were spitting out their venom, and shooting their arrows, even bitter words, against that Son of man, even that Son of God who, to display his sovereignty, and confound the wisdom of the worldly wise, chose poor fishermen to be his apostles; and whose chief of the apostles, though brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, both before and after his call to the apostleship, labored with his own hands, and worked at the trade of a tent-maker." It is pleasant to know that the young men thus expelled became useful in the church of Christ. One of them, indeed, Erasmus Middleton, who had been sustained at Oxford by Mr. Fuller, a dissenter and banker in London, was ordained in Ireland by the bishop of Down, and having married a lady of the ducal family of Gordon, in Scotland, was curate successively to the Rev. Messrs. Romaine and Cadogan in London, and finally rector of Turvey, in Bedfordshire, where he was the immediate predecessor of the sainted Legh Richmond.