Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/210

158 these were frequently managed and directed by female officers, whose organs were understood to be better disposed for the admission of those oracular gusts, as entering and passing up through a receptacle of greater capacity, and causing also a pruriency by the way, such as, with due management, hath been refined from carnal into a spiritual extasy. And, to strengthen this profound conjecture, it is farther insisted, that this custom of female priests, is kept up still in certain refined colleges of our modern Æolists, who are agreed to receive their inspiration derived through the receptacle aforesaid, like their ancestors, the sybils.

And whereas the mind of a man, when he gives the spur and bridle to his thoughts, does never stop, but naturally sallies out into both extremes, of high and low, of good and evil; his first flight of fancy, commonly transports him to ideas of what is most perfect, finished, and exalted; till having soared out of his own reach and sight, not well perceiving how near the frontiers of height and depth border upon each other; with the same course and wing, he falls down plumb into the lowest bottom of things; like one who travels the east into the west; or like a straight line drawn by its own length into a circle. Whether a tincture of malice in our natures, makes us fond of furnishing every bright idea, with its reverse; or, whether reason, reflecting upon the sum of things, can, like the sun, serve only to enlighten one half of the globe, leaving the other half by necessity under shade and darkness; or, whether