Read Dr. Isaac Barrow’s sermon on submission to the Divine will. He seems a powerful writer, but his language is debased by expressions void of all dignity. Read a good deal in Barrow on the pre-existence of human souls. Very singular; the texts on which he builds support him very faintly, yet there is a degree of probability in the system consonant to reason. _30th._—Prayed to God over the remains of my dear child, and the circumstance fills my mind with that melancholy that is not unsuitable to religious feelings. I do not wonder at the custom of the primitive Christians praying at the tombs of the departed, it is an obvious and natural prejudice. Finished Barrow, and wrote to my friend Mr. Cole to desire he would apply to his neighbour, the learned Bryant, to know his opinion of that question. Began Dr. More on the ‘Immortality of the Soul.’ Capel Lofft spent the day with us; his conversation is ready on any subject, and mine led to serious ones, which he seems to like. We had much that was metaphysical on the soul (pre-existence), a future state, &c. He is of opinion that heaven is not so very different from our ideas of what this world might be, as are commonly entertained; and rightly observes, that if death, evil, anxiety, and disease, with corporeal passions, were banished, this earth would be a heaven; and that the knowledge of one another hereafter is not at all inconsistent with our Saviour’s expression, ‘_in My Father’s house are many mansions_.’ _31st._—Read Littleton’s sermon on the necessity of well husbanding our time. It is excellent, he has thoughts and modes of expanding his observations that are beyond the common run. Laid aside Dr. More on the ‘Immortality of the Soul;’ he gets so high in the region of fancy, and is so full of jargon and supposition, under the formula of demonstrations, that I am disgusted with his farrago; and [there is] so much on witches, apparitions, &c., as to be mere rubbish.