N00618:83
A good master well served. A brief discourse on the necessary properties & practices…
A good master well served. A brief discourse on the necessary properties & practices of a good servant in every-kind of servitude: and of the methods that should be taken by the heads of a family, to obtain such a servant. / By Cotton Mather. ; [Two lines from Joel]
printed by B. Green, 1696
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
VII. Those things which may have a Tendency to make you Ill Servants. Avoid them Carefully, Religiously, Eternally. Wherefore that you may not be Bad Servants, Abandon all Bad Courses whatsoever. And let all Mispence of Time come under your very particular Detestation: Divide your Time justly between your Masters, and your Own Souls; and Squander it not away, […] any of those Impertinences, which will at all cause you with unutterable Bitterness to utter that bitter Complaint, What Fruit have I of those things whereof I am new Ashamed! No, But Redeem all the Time, you can, to accomplish your selves, with such points of Knowledge and of Goodness, as may render you Amiable to all the World. There is one special Mispence of Time, whereto Servants, and others, are commonly addicted; and that is, The Reading of […] Romances against which, Let me become in Adviser, this Day; neither Desided nor Despises. Those Romances usually be get, in the ⟨p. 49⟩unwary Readers of them, very false Notions o• Love, Honour and Virtue; and the Images o• Servants occurring in them, are usually full o• Wickedness. Besides, The most of those Romances, are such Foolish Tales, that the Readers instead of being the Wiser, or the Better fo• them, have their minds very Sensibly thereby Tainted with a Frothy Vanity. You shall there fore find, That when you have been Reading of a Romance, you will have little Heart after wards to Read the Bible, the Book of God, and of Life. But indeed! Are Books of Devotion or Books of True and Good History so Scarce that like Swine, you have only the Husks of Romances to feed upon! I say, Distemper not your Souls, with such Venomous Papers, as will ere long leave you wishing, Oh! that I could now Recall the Time which I […] in Reading of Silly Romances! Oh! That I had spent that Precious Time, in Reading these Things that might have helped me in the Service of God and of my Generation.
VII. Those things which may have a Tendency to make you Ill Servants. Avoid them Carefully, Religiously, Eternally. Wherefore that you may not be Bad Servants, Abandon all Bad Courses whatsoever. And let all Mispence of Time come under your very particular Detestation: Divide your Time justly between your Masters, and your Own Souls; and Squander it not away, any of those Impertinencies, which will at all cause you with unutterable Bitterness to utter that bitter Complaint, What Fruit have I of those things whereof I am new Ashamed! No, But Redeem all the Time, you can, to accomplish your selves, with such points of Knowledge and of Goodness, as may render you Amiable to all the World. There is one special Mispence of Time, whereto Servants, and others, are commonly addicted; and that is, The Reading of Romances against which, Let me become in Adviser, this Day; neither Desided nor Despises. Those Romances usually be get, in the