beset you, even in the summer of your days, when all seems sunshine, my heart aches for you, and I should ill perform the duty of a friend, and a monitor, if I did not endeavour to put you on your guard against those dangers which you the least suspect, and which, therefore, I dread the most for you.

In the first place, I must warn you to beware of yourselves. When you shall have completed, as you may think, your education, you will be apt to be satisfied with your attainments; you will be apt to think highly of yourselves; you may, perhaps, be tempted to look down with contempt on your elders; and because you have newer and more showy acquirements than they have, you may fancy yourselves wiser than they are. You will thus become conceited and self-opinionated. The effect of this self-conceit will be, in all likelihood, to render what you have learned altogether useless to you. You may be too well satisfied with what you think you know to be any longer willing to learn; and in the end you may find yourselves in the list of those who, because they have over-valued

themselves in youth, are despised for their foolishness when they are old.

The best preservative against these errors is to maintain a due sense of your own inexperience and insufficiency; not to be always dwelling on what you suppose to be your own excellencies, but to learn to appreciate the talents, acquirements, and good qualities of others. Above all, you must look up continually to the Saviour and Lord of all, and endeavour to copy his great humility. This, if anything can, will preserve you from yourselves, and from the snares of self-love.

The next great danger which young people have to encounter in their entrance into life, is the danger of forming injudicious friendships and intimacies; that is, intimacies with persons who may set them bad examples, and whose principles are not strengthened by religion. These persons have often the art to conceal their vicious natures from casual observers, and particularly from the young and the guileless, who are usually unsuspicious of anything wrong, particularly if under a pleasing exterior. And thus the

young and the guileless are apt to suffer themselves to be entangled in too close an intercourse with persons from whom, could they have seen them at first to be what they are, they would have shrunk. A countless number of young people have owed their ruin, the ruin both of their prospects in this world, and of their eternal happiness in the next world, to the imprudence of the early intimacies which they have formed. The thief, when asked what brought him to the gallows; the prodigal, what brought him to distress; or any other victim of vice, when asked what brought him to his miserable and degraded state; will each of them answer that he has been brought into it by the bad acquaintance which he made in his youth.

You will inquire how you are to guard yourselves from this danger. Are you to suspect that every person you see is of bad principles, or are you to suspect him of harbouring bad designs? I answer, that you need not be suspicious, you have only to be watchful. If a new acquaintance plies you with flattery, you should be doubly watchful:

for nothing is so sweet as flattery to the youthful ear. If you have a companion who treats sacred things with levity, and seeks to gloss over what you know to be wrong, be on your guard still more. And if he endeavour to allure you into a path which your conscience or your Bible tells you is a path of vice, fly that instant from him at once, as you would fly from any one who has a contagious disease.

Again, on the other hand, as the acquaintance of the vicious will contaminate, if not destroy you, so the friendship of the religious and virtuous will confirm you in virtue, and bring a credit on your name instead of a disgrace.

Remember then, I most earnestly entreat you, to choose well those whom you make your friends. Make those persons your friends, in this your spring, who will be well principled and estimable friends for you, in the more dangerous summer season of your lives. Among mere human helps there is none which is better than this, against every weakness or wilfulness of your own hearts.

K

But pray also, at the same time, earnestly, for help divine. And pray to God especially, that if it please him to bring you to the age of maturity, he will defend you, in that time of trial, with his mighty power, and further you with his continual help: that he will grant that you fall not into any sin, nor run into any kind of danger: but that all your doings may be ordered by his governance to do always that which is righteous in his sight, through Jesus Christ our Lord.