Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/97

Rh, and where very often a lady's chambermaid may be allowed to equal half the congregation, both as to quality and understanding. But I know not how it comes to pass, that professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meanings to those, who are not of their tribe: a common farmer shall make you understand in three words, that his foot is out of joint, or his collar-bone broken; wherein a surgeon, after a hundred terms of art, if you are not a scholar, shall leave you to seek. It is frequently the same case in law, physick, and even many of the meaner arts.

And upon this account it is, that among hard words, I number likewise those, which are peculiar to divinity as it is a science, because I have observed several clergymen, otherwise little fond of obscure terms, yet in their sermons very liberal of those, which they find in ecclesiastical writers, as if it were our duty to understand them; which I am sure it is not. And I defy the greatest divine to produce any law either of God or man, which obliges me to comprehend the meaning of omniscience, omnipresence, ubiquity, attribute, beatifick vision, with a thousand others so frequent in pulpits, any more than that of excentrick, idiosyncracy, entity, and the like. I believe I may venture to insist farther, that many terms used in holy writ, particularly by St. Paul, might with more discretion be changed into plainer speech, except when they are introduced as part of a quotation.

I am the more earnest in this matter, because it is a general complaint, and the justest in the world. For, a divine has nothing to say to the wisest gregation