The duties of religion,
sincerely and regularly performed, will always be sufficient to exalt
the meanest, and to exercise the highest understanding. That mind will
never be vacant, which is frequently recalled by stated duties to
meditations on eternal interests; nor can any hour be long, which is
spent in obtaining some new qualification for celestial happiness.
No. 125. TUESDAY, MAY 28, 1751.
_Descriptas servare vices, operumque colores,
Cur ego, si nequeo ignoroque, poeta salutor?_ HOR. De Ar. Poet. 86.
But if, through weakness, or my want of art,
I can't to every different style impart
The proper strokes and colours it may claim,
Why am I honour'd with a poet's name? FRANCIS.
It is one of the maxims of the civil law, that _definitions are
hazardous_. Things modified by human understandings, subject to
varieties of complication, and changeable as experience advances
knowledge, or accident influences caprice, are scarcely to be included
in any standing form of expression, because they are always suffering
some alteration of their state. Definition is, indeed, not the province
of man; every thing is set above or below our faculties. The works and
operations of nature are too great in their extent, or too much diffused
in their relations, and the performances of art too inconstant and
uncertain, to be reduced to any determinate idea.
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