by land or water, on the Sabbath, if you can possibly help it. I need not tell you, that neither the going on of your fellow passengers in the cars or steamboat, though some of them should happen to be professors of religion, nor the inconvenience of lying by for a day, affords any valid excuse for proceeding.

I shall always remember with great satisfaction the Sabbath in which I was detained, quite contrary to my calculations, at a small uncomfortable place on the Illinois river, and where I had opportunity to preach the gospel to those who seldom heard it. If you should ever cross the ocean, you must of course be out on the Lord's day, and you may preach too, with a clear conscience, if you can obtain permission and can hold on with one hand by the capstan, as I myself have done, under similar circumstances; but should you ever be caught out in a steamboat, when by making better calculations you might have been at home worshipping with your own people, I advise you, instead of preaching to your fellow Sabbath breakers as you will be urged to do, to spend the day in private fasting and prayer for them and for yourself. Though you should "speak with the tongue of men and of angels, it would be as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." Or if you must preach, by all means take the fourth commandment for your text.

In your intercourse with your people, be habitually sober minded-not melancholic; not unsociable; but sedate, guarded and self-possessed, as one who holds a sacred commission. Cheerful you may and ought to be; and sometimes you may be sprightly,

but you should never let yourself down by frivolity. Some pastors, whose preaching is of a high character, exceedingly injure their usefulness by the unguarded levity of their conversation, when they are not officially obliged to be serious. They are ministers on the Sabbath, in the sick room and at funerals, but on other days and elsewhere, you would hardly suspect their holy calling. Hence the significant remark, that “when in the pulpit they ought never to leave it, and when out of it ought never to return."

When you are abroad, have a special regard to all the proprieties of social intercourse. Let your deportment be affable, unassuming and polite. Never say or do anything, which would be offensive in the best bred families of your congregation. It is an egregious mistake to suppose, that there is any thing in the sacred profession, which either hinders or excuses a minister from being a gentlemen. On the contrary, this is a cardinal virtue. Every clergyman ought to be a gentleman; not a man of show and ceremony, but a real gentleman in his manners, in his conversation, in all his habits and feelings. This gives him ready access to all the higher classes of his congregation, and makes him welcome in the most refined society, without disqualifying him in the slightest degree, for familiar intercourse with the poor and uneducated. Whereas, if you can suppose any one in the pastoral office to be coarse and abrupt; a sloven in his person; at a loss to know what to do with his quid, in a lady's drawing room; puffing his segar in the face of other invited guests; occupying two or three chairs, because they happen to be empty;

putting his feet up upon the mantle piece; breaking down, or soiling the paper, by leaning back in his chair; he would inevitably excite the disgust of half his people and lose the respect of all.

Make it a great object, now in the early part of your ministry, to enrich and discipline your mind by reading and study. However well furnished a young man may think himself to be, when he leaves the Theological Seminary, he will find his stock running low, in less than one year after he settles, if he does not replenish it. In making sermons, you will all the while be drawing out of the vessel, and must soon come down upon the lees unless you keep pouring in at the same time. But peradventure you will ask, whether, in urging you to lay out the best of your strength in preparing for the pulpit, I have not cut you off alike from thorough investigation and miscellaneous reading? This certainly has not been my intention, and I think a little reflection will satisfy you, that there is ample room to push your theological enquiries just as far as you please, in connection with your weekly preparations for the Sabbath. When you are preaching upon the law of God, for example, it will give you a favorable opportunity, after arranging your own thoughts, to read the best and ablest books you can find on the subject. And just so when you take up depravity, or regeneration, or the atonement, or justification by faith, or any other great Bible doctrine, it gives you a fine opportunity for enriching your own mind by thorough investigation, at the same time that you are preparing 'beaten oil" for the Sanctuary. I believe I remarked

in a former letter that President Edwards preached the substance of his ablest treatises to his congregation in Northampton, long before he sent them to the press. In fact, nearly all the most distinguished divines of this country have risen to eminence by a similar process. The mind is stimulated by having an immediate object in view, as a minister has, when he brings the results of his intellectual labors before his people every Sabbath. Whatever time it may cost you, therefore, to write your sermons, it will be your own fault if you do not at the same time increase your stock of theological knowledge.

In regard to other studies, you cannot of course expect to find so much time for them as you might wish, and yet you need not wholly neglect them, especially as many of them are collateral to your profession, and will help to make you an abler writer and a better preacher.

With respect to miscellaneous reading, if you are industrious and systematic, you may at least "keep up with the times," and perhaps something more, by devoting those hours to it which you cannot safely employ in study. You can read when you cannot write. You can glance over the columns of a newspaper, when you are too much exhausted by mental effort to continue at your studies, and will even feel refreshed by the change. Yon can run your eye over some of the best American and Foreign periodical literature by way of relaxation from graver studies, with decided advantage. Every professional man needs something of this sort to relieve him from the tiresome round of official labors, and to give a new spring to his mind.

The great danger is, that men who are fond of reading and collecting general information will indulge themselves too far,and against this indulgence you should be particularly on your guard. If you find that it interferes with your studies or with your pastoral duties, you must deny yourself the pleasure. Study first and then reading. I have only one thing more to say before I close and that is

Take care of your health. The question is not how much work you can do in the shortest time, but how much you can accomplish in the aggregate. This will depend upon the length of your ministry; the length of your ministry will depend upon your health; and your health will depend in a great measure upon the care you take of it. You might bring yourself down to the grave in a few years or in one year, by excessive labor, and perhaps think you were "doing God service." An early and very dear friend of mine, who entered the ministry the same year that I did, was admonished by a venerable father that he was undertaking too much, and must relax or he could not hold out long,and his answer was, “I see ten reasons for doing more, where I can find one for doing less." It was better, he said, "to wear out than rust out," and he did wear out in the very prime of life. He has now been five and twenty years in his grave. He did a great deal in the few years that he lived, to be sure; but how much more would he have done, had his valuable life been prolonged, as there is reason to think it might have been by suitable care, to the present time.

I exhort you to take care of your own health, be