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208 exemplary, upon account of the influence which it will have upon the manners of their inferiors. And pray observe how strictly this is connected with the occasion of our present meeting; how much your good behaviour in private life will contribute to promote the good design of all these charities, and how much the contrary would tend to defeat it, and even to produce the evils which they are intended to prevent or to remedy. Whatever care be taken in the education of these poor children at school, there is always danger of their being corrupted when they come from it; and this danger is greater in proportion to the greater wickedness of the age they have to pass through. But if, upon their coming abroad into the world, they find the principles of virtue and religion recommended by the example of their superiors, and vice and irreligion really discountenanced, this will confirm them in the good principles in which they have been brought up, and give the best ground to hope they will never depart from them. And the like is to be said of offenders, who may have had a sense of virtue and religion wrought in them under the discipline of labour and confinement. Again; dissolute and debauched persons of fortune greatly increase the general corruption of manners; and this is what increases want and misery of all kinds. So that they may contribute largely to any or all of these charities, and yet undo but a very small part of the mischief which they do, by their example, as well as in other ways. But still the mischief which they do, suppose by their example, is an additional reason why they should contribute to them; even in justice to particular persons, in whose ruin they may have an unknown share of guilt, or, however, injustice to society in general; for which they will deserve commendation, how blameable soever they are for the other. And, indeed, amidst the dark prospect before us, from that profligateness of manners and scorn of religion which so generally abound, this good spirit of charity to the poor discovering itself