“I hope you understand the cathedral service—I mean, understand what they sing and say—which at first is something difficult. Unless you understand what is said, you might as well pray in an unknown tongue. On the contrary, if we do understand the service and go along with it, we shall find Church music a great help to our devotion, as it notably raises our affections towards heaven; which, I believe, has been the experience of all good men, unless they have been dunces or fanatics; nay, even the latter confess the same of their own sorry Sternhold-psalms, which are infinitely inferior to our cathedral music, as well as some thousands of years of later date, not being of two hundred years standing. We are not to think God has framed man in vain an harmonious creature; and surely music cannot be better employed than in the service and praises of Him who made both the tongue and the ear. I hope you are not so weak as to be moved by the wicked examples of idle lads who regard none of these things, or by their scoffs for your doing it. “You are to be very attentive to the sermon, because you know in whose name and by whose commission it is delivered; and that faith, and obedience too, come by hearing; this being God’s ordinance for the conversion of mankind and the Church’s edification. By practice you will be able to remember the principal parts of a sermon; which, with a little pains, will add an habitual memory to that good natural one wherewith God hath blessed you. When you come home, immediately retire, either into your closet, or else to some solitary walk in the park. There recollect what you have heard, and fix what is observable in your memory, especially what relates more immediately to yourself and to the state of your own soul. This will be of great advantage to you, on more accounts than one, for it will lay a good foundation of divinity, which study you must always have in your eye, as being both designed for it, and, I hope, inclined to it above any other. “Have a particular respect to the religion of the Sabbath, as all good men have ever had. Value highly that time, for as time, in general, is the most precious thing in the world, so this is the most precious of all others, and not designed for idle visits, but for the concern of our souls, and communion with God in prayer and praise, and other acts of piety and devotion. “I hope you dare not make any exercises upon it but what are proper for the day, such as Judge Hale did; but then, have a care lest, doing this as a school task only, it may not degenerate into formality. Rob not yourself of so much pleasure and profit as you will find in your translations of the Bible into verse, and Sunday exercises of the same nature, if you are but so happy as to reconcile fancy and devotion, which have too long been enemies.