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xvi
LIFE OF THE AUTHOR.

isted; and the same good sense told him, that nothing but a body of morality, put into action, could work with efficacy on the minds of youth. Sermons and essays, experience shewed him, were ineffectual. The manner of them was dry and uninteresting to young people; and arguments addressed to what is weakest in youth, to their understandings, he clearly perceived were without effect. He saw further, that example was the great point which formed the young; and he saw that man was composed of passions and imagination as well as of understanding.

"Such were his general principles, and upon these principles he acted. He aimed at no less than bestowing felicity on the generation he saw rising before him; and had he not had powers to accomplish his design, his wish was so grand, so noble, and of such a superior order of benevolence, that that alone would have entitled him to immortality."