but still well understood of the common folk? A preacher has been known to translate, ‘we cannot always stand upright,’ into ‘we cannot always maintain an erect position.’[1] Who can make anything out of the rubbish that follows, ‘a system thus hypothetically elaborated is after all but an inexplicable concatenation of hyperbolical incongruity?’[2] This reads like Dr. Johnson run mad; no wonder that Dissent has become rife in the land. If we wish to know the cause of the bad style employed in preaching by too many of the Anglican clergy, we must ask how they have been taught at our Schools and Universities. Much heed is there bestowed on Latin and Greek, but none on English.[3] What a change might be wrought in our pulpits if lads at public schools were given some knowledge of our great writers from Chaucer and Wickliffe downwards, instead of wasting so much time on Latin verses, that do no good in after life to three-fourths of the students! A lad of average wit only needs sound English models to be set before him, and he will teach himself much. What good service might
- ↑ Barnes, Early England, p. 106. Such a preacher would miss the point of that wittiest of all proverbs, ‘An empty sack cannot stand upright.’
- ↑ Mr. Cox, who treats us to this stuff (Recollections of Oxford, p. 223), says, ‘such sentences, delivered in a regular cadence, formed too often our Sunday fare, in days happily gone by.’
- ↑ I for some years of my life always thought that our English long was derived from the Latin longus. Every grammar and dictionary, used in schools, should have a short sketch of Comparative Philology prefixed. I know that I was fourteen, before the great truths of that science were set before me by Bishop Abraham's little book, used in the Lower Fifth form at Eton. In those days what we now call Aryan was termed Indo-Germanic.
