William Melmoth

William Melmoth (sometimes styled "the Elder"; 1665/66 – 6 April 1743) was an English devotional writer and lawyer, whose major work, The Great Importance of a Religious Life Consider'd (1711), proved to be one of the most popular pieces of religious writing of the 18th century. Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917) Charles Noel Douglas, Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical (1917) A copious manner of expression gives strength and weight to our ideas, which frequently make impression upon the mind, as iron does upon solid bodies, rather by repeated strokes than a single blow. As land is improved by sowing it with various seeds, so is the mind by exercising it with different studies. Conversation opens our views, and gives our faculties a more vigorous play; it puts us upon turning our notions on every side, and holds them up to a light that discovers those latent flaws which would probably have lain concealed in the gloom of unagitated abstraction. I cannot but take notice of the wonderful love of God to mankind, who, in order to encourage obedience to His laws, has annexed a present as well as a future reward to a good life; and has so interwoven our duty and our happiness together that, while we are discharging our obligations to the one, we are at the same time making the best provision for the other. I look upon enthusiasm, in all other points but that of religion, to be a very necessary turn of mind; as indeed it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength, in the tempers of most men. No matter what the object is, whether business, pleasures or the fine arts: whoever pursues them to any purpose must do so con amore. We should learn, by reflecting on the misfortunes which have attended others, that there is nothing singular in those which befall ourselves. External links Category:Lawyers from England Category:Non-fiction authors from England Category:Anglicans from the United Kingdom Category:1660s births Category:1743 deaths