SECT. III. IN REGARD OF MEN. 479 dom will put us in mind that the honours of birth are no certain evidences of virtue or merit : There may be some high-born animals with sorry and scoundrel souls, and some who drew their first breath in a cottage, stran- gers to title and quality, whose eminences are bright and shining. Add a grain of humility, and it will teach us that all families were one in Adam, the first man, when our blood ran in his veins : We are all made of one common earth ; we are but the same coarse mate- rials, the same clay moulded up into the form of man ; let this dwell upon the heart, and we shall not carry it so disdainfully to our kindred- clods, nor look down with such scorn upon any of our earthly brethren, our fellow- worms, because of those accidental advantages of which we imagine ourselves possessed. Or perhaps we fall into company that are unpolished and unbred, they carry rustic airs about them, while we have got a few forms of behaviour, and we publish our scorn of them to spew our breeding. Foolish insolence and preposterous vanity, which the well-bred and polite are never guilty of! But tell me, man, how long hast thou learned thy genteel and elegant behaviour, these arts and forms of boasted decency ? Canst thou not re- member the time when thy gait, and thy mein, thy speech and all thy airs were almost as awkward and un- couth as the very creature thou deridest? And wouldst thou have been willing to have had thy former awk- wardnesses made the ridicule of the company ? Couldst thou so well bear to have been the jest of the man above thee, that thou spendest thy jests so freely upon one in low life, who is the very figure of what thou hast been ? Hast thou not humility, nor prudence, nor goodness enough to remember this ? Or perhaps thou art dressed finer, and art a favourite among the great : But is this sufficient reason to scorn the poor ? Remember also that he is thy brother by nature : Naked and cast out of the favour of God together with thee; All sons and daughters of Adam the great sinner, all by nature children of wrath, strangers to the blessed God, outcasts of paradise, and averse to all that is holy: And if we behold ourselves in this state, what is there in one little lump of this wretched and polluted mass of human name, that it should exalt itself upon any little
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