His excellent friend, Dr. Doddridge, in his dedication of his Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, congratulates him, “that while condescending to the humble work of forming infant minds to the first rudiments of religious knowledge by his _various Catechisms_ and _Divine Songs_, he was also daily reading lectures of logic and other useful branches of philosophy to studious youth, and this not only in private academies but in the most celebrated seats of learning, not merely in Scotland, and in our American colonies, where for some peculiar considerations it might be most naturally expected, but, through the amiable candour of some excellent men and accomplished tutors, in our English universities too. And that he was also teaching hundreds of ministers and private christians by his sermons, and other theological tracts, so happily calculated to diffuse through their minds that light of knowledge, and through their hearts that fervour of piety, which God had been pleased to enkindle in his own. And as to my certain knowledge your compositions have been the singular comfort of many excellent christians on their dying beds, for I have heard stanzas of them repeated from the lips of several, who were doubtless in a few hours to begin the song of Moses and the Lamb, so I hope and trust, that, when God shall call you to that salvation for which your faith and patience have so long been waiting, he will shed around you the choicest beams of his favour, and gladden your heart with consolations like those which you have been the happy instrument of administering to others.” Dr. Johnson, whom no one here will suspect of partiality, and whose decisions in such case no one will dispute, acknowledges that few books had been perused by him with greater pleasure, than Watts’s Improvement of the Mind, of which he says, “the radical principles may indeed be found in Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding, but they are so expanded and ramified by Watts, as to confer upon him the merit of a work in the highest degree useful and pleasing. Whoever has the care of instructing others may be charged with deficience in his duty if this book be not recommended.” Of his Logic, which soon obtained considerable celebrity at home and abroad, Lord Barrington speaks in the following terms of high encomium: