academy; and, in 1685, two years after Samuel Wesley left him to go to the Oxford University, he went to America, where he was chosen pastor of a church at Charleston, and became vice-president of Harvard College. Here he died in 1697, at the age of about seventy-one. He was a man of a sweet natural temper, and of a generous public spirit, an indefatigable friend, pious, learned, ingenious, useful, and beloved by all who knew him. He published nearly twenty treatises and other works,—all of them, however, compendious, for he was an enemy to large volumes, and used to say, “A great book is a great evil.” Dunton states, that his “high character led many of the persecuted Nonconformists to join him in America. He was the very soul of philosophy, the repository of all arts and sciences, and of the Graces too. His discourses were not stale or studied, but always new; high, but not soaring; practical, but not low. His memory was as vast as his knowledge. He was as far from ignorance as from pride; and, if we may judge of a man’s religion by his charity, he was a sincere Christian.” Samuel Wesley himself says: “Mr Morton was an ingenious and universally learned man; but his chiefest excellency lay in mathematics. He had many gentlemen of estate, who paid him well; but he thought more of the glory of God than of his own private profit. He only wished to save himself harmless; and, therefore, if he had little for some, he valued it not, so as it was barely made up by others, and he could send out new ministers to be ordained by presbyters.” While, however, Mr Wesley speaks so commendably of Mr Morton, his language is widely different in reference to Mr Morton’s pupils. He writes: “The pupils entertained a mortal aversion to the Episcopal order; and there were but very few but what abhorred monarchy itself. The king-killing doctrines were generally received and defended.” On one occasion some of the students went out at midnight to a little hill not far from Newington, and, with a speaking trumpet, alarmed the town, and then, through the trumpet, bellowed scandalous stories respecting the clergyman of the place, the Rev. Mr S. Those among them who composed the bitterest and most ill-mannered sarcasms on the public prayers and liturgy of the Church, were caressed, hugged, encouraged, and commended by the heads of the Dissenting party, Wesley himself sharing in the applause awarded. The students, also, were in the habit of reading “the most lewd, abominable books that ever blasted Christian eye;” but it is right to add, that this was done without the knowledge of their tutors. Mr Morton’s was the principal Dissenting academy in the land, containing forty or fifty pupils, and having annexed to it “a fine garden, a bowling-green, a fish-pond, and a laboratory furnished with all sorts of mathematical instruments.”[16] ----- Footnote 16: Wesley’s _Letter from a Country Divine_. Third edit. London: 1706. -----