used by preachers and religious writers which neither they nor their
hearers or readers understand. In some of them there is nothing to be
understood. They are mere words; meaningless sounds. Some of them have
meanings, but they are hard to come at, and when you have got at them
you find them to be worse than none. They are falsehoods that lurk
within the dark and antiquated words. I have heard and even read whole
sermons in which nine sentences out of ten had no more meaning in them
than the chatter of an ape. Perhaps not so much. I have gone through
large volumes and found hardly a respectable, plain-meaning sentence
from beginning to end. And wagon loads of so-called religious books may
still be found, in which, as in the talk of one of Shakespeare's
characters, the ideas are to the words as three grains of wheat to a
bushel of chaff; you may search for them all day before you find them;
and when you find them they are good for nothing. When I first came
across such books I supposed it was my ignorance or want of capacity
that made it impossible for me to understand them; but I found, at
length, that there was nothing in them to understand. There are other
books which have a meaning, a good meaning, but it is wrapped up in such
out-of-the-way words and phrases, that it is difficult to get at it. Men
of science have not only discarded the foolish fictions of darker ages,
but have begun to simplify their language; to cast aside the unspeakable
and unintelligible jargon of the past, and to use plain, good, common
English, thus rendering the study of nature pleasant even to children;
while many divines, by clinging to the unmeaning and mischievous
phraseology of ancient dreamers, render the study of religion repulsive,
and the attainment of sound Christian knowledge almost impossible to the
masses of mankind. And all these things become occasions of unbelief.
"So long as Christian preachers and writers are limited so much to human
creeds and systems, or to stereotyped phrases of any kind, and avail
themselves so little of the popular diction of literature and of common