"It gives me pain when I 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, in other times; men who lived in other ages of the world, and
under very different circumstances from ourselves; whose opinions, all
of which are worth preserving, might be given in our own language, so
as to answer every purpose which can be answered by them, at less than
a hundredth part of the expense it necessarily requires to obtain a
competent knowledge of those languages in which almost every thing,
supposed to be valuable, has been originally written. And after all,
the truth, or falsity, of every proposition must depend on the truth
or falsity of the principles embraced in it; and not on the language
in which it was originally written.

"If the Greek and Hebrew languages be any security against things
being uttered or written falsely in those languages, I should not only
think it important to learn them, but to adopt them, if possible, as
our vernacular tongue.--But as I believe none will contend for this, I
should like to be informed of what possible service it can be to an
American to learn either of those languages? Is it not a fact, that
every natural as well as moral truth may be fully unfolded to the
understanding without them? This will lead the way to one of the
principal subjects which I mean to discuss. It maybe said, that the
_holy scriptures_ were originally written in Greek and Hebrew: viz.
the bible, which contains a revelation of the will of God concerning
the duty, interest, and final destination of mankind. This, if
admitted, gives the Greek and Hebrew languages an importance that
nothing else could. Hence the importance of preserving the Greek and