nd phrases
at schools instead of human meanings)--there are masked words abroad, I
say, which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most
people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they
mean this or that, or the other, of things dear to them: for such words
wear chameleon cloaks--"groundlion" cloaks, of the color of the ground
of any man's fancy: on that ground they lie in wait, and rend him with
a spring from it. There never were creatures of prey so mischievous,
never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these
masked words; they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas: whatever
fancy or favorite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his
favorite masked word to take care of for him; the word at last comes to
have an infinite power over him,--you cannot get at him but by its
ministry.

17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a
fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost whether they
will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin words for an idea when
they want it to be awful; and Saxon or otherwise common words when they
want it to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary effect, for
instance, would be produced on the minds of people who are in the habit
of taking the Form of the "Word" they live by, for the Power of which
that Word tells them, if we always either retained, or refused, the
Greek form "biblos," or "biblion," as the right expression for
"book"--instead of employing it only in the one instance in which we
wish to give dignity to the idea, and translating it into English
everywhere else. How wholesome it would be for many simple persons,
if, in such places (for instance) as Acts xix. 19, we retained the
Greek expression, instead of translating it, and they had to
read--"Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their bibles
together, and burnt them before all men; and they counted the price of
them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver!" Or, if, on the
other hand, we translated where we retain it, and always spoke of "The
Holy Book," instead of "Holy Bible," it might come into more heads than
it does at present, that the Word of God, by which the heavens were, of
old, and by which they are now kept in store,[3] cannot be made a
present of to anybody in morocco binding; nor sown on any wayside by
help either of steam plough or steam press; but is nevertheless being
offered to us daily, and