Some doctrines they
exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or
pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish
traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a
mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it in an
antiquated and outlandish dress. The language of many theologians, like
the Latin of the Romish Church, is, to vast numbers, a dead
language,--an unknown tongue. There are hundreds of words and phrases
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.
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