Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 18.djvu/201

Rh before he presumes to plead "the law of nature" in the pulpit; to learn mathematicks, before he, pretends to demonstrate there; to peruse Aristotle, Tacitus, and the State Tracts, before he meddles with politicks; and be able to act Eteocles, before he attempts Greek quotations in his sermons. What if Jocasta or Antigone should hear a mispronunciation from the pulpit; or any other of those young Greeks who so lately did an honour to Euripides, transported their audience into Thebes, and inspired the old bachelors on the foremost bench with that which they so handsomely represented!

I say, time gives a natural right of precedence by common consent; and hence age is honoured above youth, and by it. The very heathens thought it indecency, and a trespass in point of manners, "si juvenis seni non assurrexerit," if a young man did not rise up, and give way to an older; and the canonists, I hope, will be ingenuous enough to own, though in this argument against their brethren the civilians, that it was a rule of the primitive church, that a deacon should not sit in the presence of a presbyter. In a word, wisdom and experience, which are divine qualities, are the properties of age, and make it honourable, and youth in the want of them contemptible. But