must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved." These words, I own, are in the book, and, being both innocent and true, like to remain there in all future impressions. But I will likewise own very freely, that, if I had wrote with a design to be understood by the meanest capacities, I would not have chose the subject there treated of; or if I had, I would have amplified and explained every period, talked and distinguished magisterially, and never appeared without the fescue in my hand. As for example; to make the passage pointed at intelligible, I would have bestowed a page or two on the meaning of the word Evil; after that I would have taught them, that every defect, every want, was an evil; that on the multiplicity of those wants depended all those mutual services which the individual members of a society pay to each other; and that consequently, the greater variety there was of wants, the larger number of individuals might find their private interest in labouring for the good of others, and, united together, compose one body. Is there a trade or handicraft but what supplies us with something we wanted? This want certainly, before it was supplied, was an evil, which that trade or handicraft was to remedy, and without which it could never have been thought of. Is there an art or science that was not invented to mend some defect! Had this latter not existed, there could have been no occasion for the former to move it. I say, p. 236. "The excellency of human thought and contrivance has been, and is yet nowhere more conspicuous, than in the variety of tools and instruments of workmen and artificers, and the multiplicity of engines, that were all invented, either to assist the weakness of man, to correct his many imperfections, to gratify his laziness, or obviate his impatience." Several foregoing pages run in the same strain. But what relation has all this to religion or infidelity, more than it has to navigation or the peace in the north? The many hands that are employed to supply our natural wants, that are really such, as hunger, thirst, and nakedness, are inconsiderable to the vast numbers that are all innocently gratifying the depravity of our corrupt nature, I mean the industrious, who get a livelihood by their honest labour, to which the vain and voluptuous must be beholden for all their tools and implements of ease and luxury. "The short-sighted vulgar, in the chain of causes, seldom can see farther than one link; but those who can enlarge their view, and will give themselves leisure of gazing on the prospect of concatenated events, may, in a hundred places, see good spring up, and pullulate from evil, as naturally as chickens do from eggs." The words are to be found p. 46. in the Remark made on the seeming paradox; that in the grumbling hive, The worst of all the multitude Did something for the common good.