5. Am I a tolerable master of the _sciences_? Have I gone through the very gate of them, _logic_? If not, I am not likely to go much farther, when I stumble at the threshold. Do I understand it, so as to be ever the better for it? To have it always ready for use? So as to apply every rule of it, when occasion is, almost as naturally as I turn my hand? Do I understand it at all? Are not even the _moods_ and _figures_ above my comprehension? Do not I poorly endeavour to cover my ignorance, by affecting to laugh at their barbarous names? Can I even reduce an _indirect_ mood to a _direct_? An _hypothetic_ to a _categorical_ syllogism? Rather, have not my stupid indolence and laziness, made me very ready to believe what the little wits and pretty gentlemen affirm, “That logic is good for nothing?” It is good for this at least (wherever it is understood) to make people _talk less_; by shewing them both what is, and what is not to the point; and how extremely hard it is to _prove_ any thing. Do I understand _metaphysics_? If not the depths of the schoolmen, the subtleties of _Scotus_ or _Aquinas_, yet the first rudiments, the general principles of that useful _science_? Have I conquered so much of it, as to clear my apprehension and range my ideas under proper heads? So much as enables me to read with ease and pleasure as well as profit, Dr. _Henry More_’s Works, _Malebranche’s Search after Truth_, and Dr. _Clark’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God_? Do I understand _natural philosophy_? If I have not gone deep therein, have I digested the general grounds of it? Have I mastered _Gravesande_, _Keil_, Sir _Isaac Newton’s Principia_, with his _Theory of Light and Colours_? In order thereto, have I laid in some stock of _mathematical_ knowledge? Am I master of the mathematical A B C, of _Euclid’s Elements_? If I have not gone thus far, if I am such a novice still, what have I been about ever since I came from school? 6. Am I acquainted with the _fathers_? At least with those venerable men, who lived in the earliest ages of the church? Have I read over and over the golden remains of _Clemens Romanus_, of _Ignatius_ and _Polycarp?_ And have I given one reading, at least, to the works of _Justin Martyr_, _Tertullian_, _Origen_, _Clemens Alexandrinus_ and _Cyprian_?