Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably.

We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged — Define your terms.

A jurisconsult, in his criminal institute, announces that the non-observance of Sundays and holidays is treason against the Divine Majesty. Treason against the Divine Majesty gives an idea of the most enormous of crimes, and the most dreadful of chastisements. But what constitutes the offence? To have missed vespers? — a thing which may happen to the best man in the world.

In all disputes on liberty, one reasoner generally understands one thing, and his adversary another. A third comes in who understands neither the one nor the other, nor is himself understood. In these disputes, one has in his head the power of acting; a second, the power of willing; a third, the desire of executing; each revolves in his own circle, and they never meet. It is the same with quarrels about grace. Who can understand its nature, its operations, the sufficiency which is not sufficient, and the efficacy which is ineffectual.

The words substantial form were pronounced for two thousand years without suggesting the least notion. For these, plastic natures have been substituted, but still without anything being gained.

A traveller, stopped on his way by a torrent, asks a villager on the opposite bank to show him the ford: “Go to the right!” shouts the countryman. He takes the right and is drowned. The other runs up crying: “Oh! how unfortunate! I did not tell him to go to his right, but to mine!”

The world is full of these misunderstandings. How will a Norwegian, when reading this formula: Servant of the servants of God; discover that it is the Bishop of Bishops, and King of Kings who speaks?

At the time when the “Fragments of Petronius” made a great noise in the literary world, Meibomius, a noted learned man of Lübeck, read in the printed letter of another learned man of Bologna: “We have here an entire Petronius, which I have seen with my own eyes and admired.” Habemus hic Petronium integrum, quem vidi meis oculis non sine admiratione. He immediately set out for Italy, hastened to Bologna, went to the librarian Capponi, and asked him if it were true that they had the entire Petronius at Bologna. Capponi answered that it was a fact which had long been public. “Can I see this Petronius? Be so good as to show him to me.” &ldq............