The Board has been busy in voting testimonies to the memory of the Duke of Bedford, a race who should express most strongly their veneration. The Bishop of Llandaff brought a dedication for the volume now ready—a medal ordered and a bust. These people are carnal and worldly, except, however, Mr. Wilberforce, who much promoted it, and spoke often in favour of it. His example is authority, or I should have considered the whole as a worldly-minded business, and bad. This Duke, with vast powers and immense influence, set an example to a town and populous neighbourhood in the country, and to a great circle of friends and dependents, of an utter neglect, if not contempt, of religion: all was worldly in his views; all his motives tending that way, and his example mischievous to religion and the souls of men. All this praise and veneration is therefore very questionable, and, I think, unlawful; it is looking at objects and judging of things with the herd, and therefore wrong; we cannot go with them but to do mischief. Of what consequence is religion to the world if farming and beneficence and good temper, and a life highly useful in a worldly view, is to outweigh the evils of irreligion, and so very bad an example in morals and want of piety? I cannot approve of it, much as I liked the man in all worldly respects. Dr. Pearson talking of experiments observed that contrary experiments to good ones are nothing. ‘I can get evidence for or against anything: for the existence of angels and devils,’ &c. He is a great infidel, one of the gang of philosophers of the Royal Society, whose head, Sir J. B., is of the same mould, and whose influence is all on the same side, and does much mischief. The great, the wise, and the learned in this town, I fear, are nineteen in twenty infidels. Shocking! dreadful to think of!! Dined at the Duke of Grafton’s, Menil the Nimrod and Dr. Halifax there. I never fail to combat his Unitarianism, but do no good; yet his arguments are weak as water. _20th._—At the Farmers’ Club. Carried with some difficulty a premium of fifty guineas for the best plough; several voted against it, because impossible to decide which of several should be the best! These folks can hardly know the right end of a plough.