The other fact, in the preceding letter, which deserves to be noticed is, that Samuel Wesley recommends his son, as a Sabbath exercise, to make “translations of the Bible into verse.” He was as fond of sacred song as he was of sacred music. Besides his poetical “Life of Christ,” he had already done what he recommends to his son Samuel, for, in three volumes, he had turned the whole of the histories of the Old and New Testaments into verse; and, though his eldest son did not adopt his suggestion, it was substantially adopted by his youngest son Charles, who, fifty-six years afterwards, published in two volumes his “Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures;” the hymns being two thousand and thirty in number, all founded upon particular texts, beginning with Genesis and ending with the Revelation of St John. At the risk of being tedious, we cannot deny ourselves the gratification of inserting the substance of two other letters, written by Mr Wesley to his son Samuel, at Westminster School, in the same year as the above were written, 1706:— “EPWORTH, _September 1706_. “DEAR CHILD,—The second part of piety regards your duty towards your parents, towards whom I hope you will behave yourself as you ought to the last moment of their lives. “Some people, who are either fond of paradoxes, or have imbibed ill principles from our modern plays and such like authors, may, for aught I know, be in earnest when they defend that most erroneous and unnatural principle that ‘we owe nothing to our parents on account that they are the immediate authors of our being.’ But these seem to forget that God himself, the common Father of the universe, urges this as an argument against the ingratitude of his people, ‘Is he not thy Father?’ &c. And again, in Malachi, ‘If I be a father, where is my honour?’ Perhaps you will think I am pleading my own cause, and so indeed I am, in some measure; but it is the cause of my mother also, and even your own cause, if ever you should have children, and, indeed, that of nature and civil society, which would be dissolved or exceedingly weakened if this great foundation-stone should be removed.