though through the wanderings of the human mind, may have not a little
hay, wood and stubble, yet possess too much gold, silver and precious
stones, to be forsaken as a pile of rubbish.

It gives you "pain to see what time and money, what labour and toil
have been expended and are still expending in plodding over as it were
an old dead letter; to learn languages which exist _no where_ only on
paper, barely for the sake of reading the opinions of other men who
lived in other times," &c. But you allow that all this would be
necessary if "the only revelation of God to man, which was ever
recorded on vellum or paper was written partly in Greek and partly in
Hebrew," and that "the will of God cannot be known only through the
medium of those languages." In this last particular, you express what
appears very reasonable, and I presume you would be willing to consent
to all this expense and toil, even if the proposition were to lose
part of its importance, and it were only contended that God had
actually made a revelation to man, which was written originally partly
in Greek and partly in the Hebrew, without saying that he has never
caused a revelation to be written originally in any other language.

A revelation from God, if it were written only in the Hebrew or Greek,
would be considered of sufficient value to recompence the labour of
learning the language. But you contend that this revelation, if real,
can be translated into English, but, you must allow that to translate
it, the original must be learned first. Will you say, that after the
translation is once made, the original is of no more use? How then are
future ages to determine whether they have not been imposed on?
Suppose no person of the present age understood the languages in which
the scriptures were first written, surely in this case, those
languages would be lost beyond recovery. Suppose then it should be