meet a consequence unspeakaory disastrous, will an unhallowed and proud refinement appear to have been a worthy cause for which to incur it? You deserve to be disgusted with a divine communication, and to lose all its benefits, if you can thus let every thing have a greater influence on your feelings concerning it than its truth and importance, and if its accidental and separable associations with littleness, can counteract its essential inseparable ones with the Governor and Redeemer of the world, with happiness, and with eternity. With what compassion might you be justly regarded by an illiterate but zealous christian, whose interest in the truths of the New Testament, at once constitutes the best felicity here, and securely carries him toward the kingdom of his Father; while you are standing aloof, and perhaps thinking, that if he and all such as he were dead, you might, after a while, acquire the spirit which should impel you also toward heaven. But why do you not feel your individual concern in this great subject as absolutely as if all men were dead, and you heard alone in the earth the voice of God; or as if you saw, like the solitary exile of Patmos, an awful appearance of Jesus Christ and the visions of hereafter? What is it to you that many christians have given an aspect of littleness to the gospel, or that a few have sustained and exemplified its sublimity?

LETTER III.

ANOTHER cause which I think has tended to render evangelical religion less acceptable to persons of taste, is the peculiarity of language adopted in the discourses and books of its teachers, as well as in the religious conversation and correspondence of the majority of its

adherents. I do not refer to any past age, when an excessive quaintness deformed the composition of so many writers on religion and all other subjects; my assertion is respecting the diction at present in use.

The works collectively of the best writers in the language, of those especially who may be called the moderns of the language, have created and substantially fixed a standard of general phraseology. If any department is exempted from the authority of this standard, it is the low one of humour and buffoonery, in which the writer may coin and fashion phrases at his whim. But in the language of the higher, and of what may be called middle order of writing, that authority is the law. It does indeed allow indefinite varieties of what is called style, since twenty able and approved writers might be cited, who have each a different style; but yet there is a certain general character of expression which they have mainly concurred to establish. This compound result of all their modes of writing is become sanctioned as the classical manner of employing the language, as the form in which it constitutes the most rectified general vehicle of thought. And though it is difficult to define this standard, yet a well-read person of taste feels when it is transgressed or deserted, and pronounces that no classical writer has employed that phrase, or would have combined those words in such a manner.

The deviations from this standard must be, first, by mean or vulgar diction, which is below it; or secondly, by a barbarous diction, which is out of it, or foreign to it; or thirdly, by a diction which, though foreign to it, is yet not to be termed barbarous, because it is elevated entirely above the authority of the standard, by some transcendent force or majesty of thought, or a superhuman communication of truth.

I might make some charge against the language of

divines under the first of these distinctions; but iny present attention is to what seems to me to come under the second character of difference from the standard, that of being barbarous.-The phrases peculiar to any trade, profession, or fraternity, are barbarous, if they were not low; they are commonly both. The language of law is felt by every one to be barbarous in the extreme, not only by the huge lumber of its technical terms, but by its very structure, in the parts not consisting of technical terms. The language of science is barbarous, as far as it differs arbitrarily, and in more than the use of those terms which are indispensable to the science, from the pure general model. And I am afraid that, on the same principle, the accustomed diction of evangelical religion also must be pronounced barbarous. For I suppose it will be instantly allowed, that the mode of expression of the greater number of evangelical divines,* and of those taught by them, is widely different from the standard of general language, not only by the necessary adoption of some peculiar terms, but by a continued and systematic cast of phraseology;

When I say evangelical divines, I concur with the opinion of those, who deem a considerable, and, in an intellectual and literary view, a highly respectable class of the writers who have professedly taught christianity, to be not strictly evangelical. They might rather be denominated moral and philosophical divines, illustrating and enforcing very ably the generalities of religion, and the christian morals, but not placing the economy of redemption exactly in that light in which the New Testament appears to place it. Some of these have avoided the kind of dialect on which I am animadverting, not only by means of a diction more classical and dignified in the general principles of its structure, but also by avoiding the ideas with which the phrases of this dialect are commonly associated. may however here observe, that it is by no means altogether confined to the specifically evangelical department of writing and discourse, though it there prevails the most, and with the greatest number of phrases. It extends, in some degree, into the majority of writing on religion in general, and may therefore be called the theological, almost as properly as the evangelical, dialect.

I

insomuch that in reading or hearing five or six sentences of an evangelical discourse, you ascertain the school by the mere turn of expression, independently of any attention to the quality of the ideas. If, in order to try what those ideas would appear in an altered form of words, you attempted to reduce a paragraph to the language employed by intellectual men in speaking or writing well on general subjects, you would find it must be absolutely a version. You know how easily a vast mass of exemplification might be quoted; and the specimens would give the idea of an attempt to create, out of the general mass of the language, a dialect which should be intrinsically spiritual; and so exclusively appropriated to christian doctrine as to be totally unserviceable for any other subject, and to become ludicrous when applied to it.* And this being extracted, like the sabbath from the common course of time, the general range of diction is abandoned, with all its powers, diversities, and elegance, to secular subjects and the use of the profane. It is a kind of popery of language, vilifying every thing not marked with the signs of the holy church, and forbidding any one to minister to religion except in consecrated speech.

Suppose that a heathen foreigner had acquired a full acquaintance with our language in its most classical construction, yet without learning any thing about the gospel, (which it is true enough he might do,) and that he then happened to read or hear an evangelical discourse he would be exceedingly surprised at the

This is so true, that it is no uncommon expedient with the would-be wits, to introduce some of the spiritual phrases, in speaking of any thing which they wish to render ludicrous; and they are generally so far successful as to be rewarded by the laugh or the smile of the circle, who probably may never have had the good fortune of hearing wit, and have not the sense or conscience to care about religion.

cast of phraseology. He would probably be arrested and perplexed in such a manner as hardly to know whether he was trying his faculties on the new doctrine, or on the singularity of the diction; whereas the general course of the diction should appear but the same as that to which he had been accustomed. It should be such that he would not even think of it, but only of the new subject and peculiar ideas which were coming through it to his apprehension; unless there could be some advantage in the necessity of looking at these ideas through the mist and confusion of the double medium, created by the super-induction of an uncouth special dialect on the general language.-Or if he were not a stranger to the subject, but had acquired its leading principles from some author or speaker who employed (with the addition of a very small number of peculiar terms) the same kind of language in which any other serious subject would have been discoursed on, he would still be not less surprised. "Is it possible," he would say, as soon as he could apprehend what he was attending to, "that these are the very same views which lately presented themselves with such lucid simplicity to my understanding? Or is there something more, of which I am not aware, conveyed and concealed under these strange shapings of phrase? Is this another stage of the religion, the school of the adepts, in which I am not yet initiated? And does religion then every where, as well as in my country, affect to show and guard its importance by relinquishing the simple language of intelligence, and assuming a sinister dialect of its own? Or is this the diction of an individual only, and of one who really intends but to convey the same ideas that I have elsewhere received in so much more clear and direct a vehicle of words? But then, in what remote corner, placed beyond the authority of