To stated and public instruction he added familiar visits and
personal application, and was careful to improve the opportunities
which conversation offered of diffusing and increasing the influence
of religion. By his natural temper he was quick of resentment; but
by his established and habitual practice he was gentle, modest, and
inoffensive. His tenderness appeared in his attention to children,
and to the poor. To the poor, while he lived in the family of his
friend, he allowed the third part of his annual revenue; though the
whole was not a hundred a year; and for children he condescended to
lay aside the scholar, the philosopher, and the wit, to write little
poems of devotion, and systems of instruction, adapted to their
wants and capacities, from the dawn of reason through its gradations
of advance in the morning of life. Every man acquainted with the
common principles of human action will look with veneration on the
writer who is at one time combating Locke, and at another making a
catechism for children in their fourth year. A voluntary descent
from the dignity of science is perhaps the hardest lesson that
humility can teach.

As his mind was capacious, his curiosity excursive, and his industry
continual, his writings are very numerous and his subjects various.
With his theological works I am only enough acquainted to admire his
meekness of opposition, and his mildness of censure. It was not
only in his book, but in his mind, that orthodoxy was united with
charity.

Of his philosophical pieces, his "Logic" has been received into the
Universities, and therefore wants no private recommendation; if he
owes part of it to Le Clerc, it must be considered that no man who
undertakes merely to methodise or illustrate a system pretends to be