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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