He followed me, and taking hold of my coat, said with some
earnestness, 'It could not be mere chance, for that somebody must have
contrived matters so as to produce it.' I pretend not to give his words,
or my own, for I have forgotten both; but I give the substance of what
passed between us in such language as we both understood.--'So you
think,' I said, 'that what appears so regular as the letters of your
name cannot be by chance.' 'Yes,' said he, with firmness, 'I think so.'
'Look at yourself,' I replied, 'and consider your hands and fingers,
your legs and feet, and other limbs; are they not regular in their
appearance, and useful to you?' He said, 'they were.' 'Came you then
hither,' said I, 'by chance?' 'No,' he answered, 'that cannot be;
something must have made me.' 'And who is that something?' I asked. He
said, 'he did not know.' (I took particular notice, that he did not say,
as Rousseau fancies a child in like circumstances would say, that his
parents made him.) I had now gained the point I aimed at; and saw, that
his reason taught him (though he could not so express it) that what
begins to be must have an intelligent cause, I therefore told him the
name of the Great Being who made him and all the world; concerning whose
adorable nature I gave him such information as I thought he could, in
some measure, comprehend. The lesson affected him greatly, and he never
forgot either it or the circumstance that introduced it."

So great was the docility of this boy, that before he had reached his
twentieth year, he had been thought capable of succeeding his father in
his office of public professor. When death had extinguished those hopes,
the comfort and expectation of the parent were directed to his only
surviving child, who, with less application and patience, had yet a
quickness of perception that promised to supply the place of those
qualities. But this prospect did not continue to cheer him long. In
March 1796, the youth was attacked by a fever, which, in seven days,
laid him by the side of his brother. He was in his eighteenth year. The
sole consolation, with which this world could now supply Beattie, was,
that if his sons had lived, he might have seen them a prey to that
miserable distemper under which their mother, whose state had rendered a
separation from her family unavoidable, was still labouring. From this
total bereavement he sometimes found a short relief in the estrangement
of his own mind, which refused t