and wisdom will permit it to ripen into ma❤ turity, and to blossom into fruit; that it's branches may over-shadow the earth, and afford shade and shelter to all the offspring of Adam from the burning fire of oppression, and the desolating blasts of penury and want.

This Society has laid the great pillars of it's edifice on the Rock of Ages; and the storms of time, and the tempests of the world shall beat against it in vain; it shall stand a monument of wisdom, and a memorial of goodness through all the circling seasons of eternity.

This pure and hallowed Temple of the most high God shall preserve it's sacred fire unquenched, and unextinguished, even, amidst the crash of desolation, when the elements shall melt with fervent heat, when the Sun; shall be darkened, and the Moon shall refuse to give her light, when the Book of Life shall be opened, and the last, dread judgment, from which there is no appeal, shall be pronounced on every man according to his deeds, when every mouth shall be stopped, and the Redeemer shall display the wonders of his glory to all his Saints.

ESSAY CXXII.

FOLLY OF INDISCRIMINATE VISITING.

NEVER are the consequences resulting from an indiscriminate acquaintance, and a too sudden friendship more severely felt than by those youths who tenderly educated at home, and unacquainted with vice, enter the world only the day in which they are received within the precincts of a college. It is not for me to pollute my pages with the vices, or to stain it with the enormities daily practised in all the seats of learning, where the groves of · Academus oftener resound with the turbulent uproar of bacchanalians, than with the lyre of Apollo, or the pure language of philo sophy.

The gravity of the moralist, the sarcastic wit of the satirist, as well as the humourous pen of the writer of novels, have in vain been exercised; though the irresistible force of reason has convinced, the sting of satire chastised, and the pleasantry of humour diverted, these degenerate sons of the Muses, they con

tinue to-day to practice the iniquity, they yesterday performed; and regardless of the morrow, think only of their present pleasure. And they who in the present state of society hope for a reformation from the precepts of morality, or the castigation of satire, confess their ignorance, and acknowledge their weakness.

But was this axiom properly urged from the first dawning of reason, that knowledge and virtue, alone, will ensure to their possessors an ever durable felicity, and confer upon them the greatest and most essential power, we should no longer have to reproach our Universities with being destructive to innocence, and fatal to morality. The professors would be listened to without the extortion of fines, science would be prosecuted with avidity, not considered as a painful task, and literature would be courted for the di-' versity of it's charms, and the certainty of it's reward.

These, however, are not the proper subjects of this paper's discussion; the chief import of which is to set forth some of the ill consequences of young men at their first

going to an university, making too general and too indiscriminate an acquaintance.-. Those already brutified by iniquity, and sunk in dissipation, are not likely to be reclaimed by books which they never read, nor by precepts which they contemn; the ignorant cannot understand, and the obstinate rush on their own way, and prefer ruin, and destruction, rather than listen to advice, or submit to reproof.

But there are many amiable youths, whose hearts glow with every virtue, and whose minds are capable of the highest attainments, who err, and are misled, only because they have no friend to teach, no guide to instruct, and these are often the unfortunate victims of deceit and systematized villainy; for who so liable to suffer from the poison of the hypocrite, as he whose heart knows no guile, and whose ignorance of mankind, induces him to measure the actions of others by the purity of his own. Youths like these, unused to the world, are very susceptible of friendship, and pour out the effusions of their soul to the first villain who under the mask of hypocrisy. finds the way to their heart, and too often

that of converting their excellence into the basest degradation.

A young man of this description, upon first leaving his father's house, to enter upon the more public life of a student, often at first feels a degree of bashfulness amounting to pain, he imagines what he often really is, the but, and laughing stock of the rest, and shrinks from observation; every thing is new and strange; he hears conversation at which he is shocked, and sees those things he has considered as most sacred and important, ridiculed and despised. He regards what he does not understand, as too learned for his faculties to comprehend, and too profound for his understanding to penetrate. He considers the fellow students whom he sees most forward and blustering, as geniuses of the first class, with whom he despairs ever to become acquainted; and the professors haranguing from their chairs he supposes to be men whose names will float down the stream of time with increasing honour; never suspecting, but that their distinguished rank is the reward of merit, and the result of decided superiority. He feels his own incapacity;