It was his rule to cultivate those who were inimical to him by every mark of attention and act of kindness; and rather to seek than avoid an intercourse with them. His incessant attention to his studies frequently made him absent in society: this sometimes produced whimsical incidents. Whatever delight he found in his literary pursuits, he never sacrificed his religious duties to them, or permitted them to trespass on _his exercises of devotion_. Huet, whom, from his resemblance to our author in unremitted application to study, the editor has often had occasion to mention, laments his own contrary conduct in {040} very feeling terms: "I was entirely carried," says he, (_De Rebus ad eum Pertinentibus_, 174,) "by the pleasure found in learning: the endless variety which it affords had taken up my thoughts, and seized all the avenues of my mind, that I was altogether incapable of any sweet and intimate communication with God. When I withdrew into religious retirement, in order to recollect my scattered thoughts, and fix them on heavenly things, I experienced a dryness and insensibility of soul by which the Holy Spirit seemed to punish this excessive bent to learning." This misfortune our author never experienced. A considerable portion of his time was devoted to prayer. When it was in his power, he said mass every day; when he travelled, he rose at a very early hour, that he might hear it: he never neglected the prayer of the _Angelus_, and, when he was not in the company of strangers, he said it on his knees. He recommended a frequent approach to the sacrament of the altar: some, under his spiritual direction, communicated almost every day. The _morale severe_ of the Jansenists he strongly reprobated in discourse, and no person receded further from it in practice: but he was an admirer of the style of the gentlemen of Port Royal, and spoke with praise of their general practice of avoiding the insertion of the pronoun _I_ in their writings. He thought the Bible should not be read by very young persons, or by those who were wholly uninformed: even the translation of the whole divine office of the church he thought should not be given to the faithful promiscuously. In the printed correspondence of Fenelon, a long letter by him on frequent communion, and one on reading the Bible, (they deserve to be translated and generally read,) express exactly our author's sentiments on those subjects. All singularity in devotion was offensive to him. He exhorted every one to a perfect discharge of the ordinary duties of his situation, to a conformity to the divine will, both in great and little occasions, to good temper and mildness in his intercourse with his neighbor, to an habitual recollection of the divine presence, to a scrupulous attachment to truth, to retirement, to extreme sobriety. These, he used to say, were the virtues of the primitive Christians, and among them, he said, we should always look for perfect models of Christian virtue.