rom tearing one another
to pieces." The great controversy between Abelard and St. Bernard, when
the saint accused the scholastic of maintaining heretical notions of the
Trinity, long agitated the world; yet, now that these confusers of words
can no longer inflame our passions, we wonder how these parties could
themselves differ about words to which we can attach no meaning
whatever. There have been few councils or synods where the omission or
addition of a word or a phrase might not have terminated an interminable
logomachy! At the council of Basle, for the convenience of the
disputants, John de Secubia drew up a treatise of _undeclined words_,
chiefly to determine the signification of the particles _from_, _by_,
_but_, and _except_, which it seems were perpetually occasioning fresh
disputes among the Hussites and the Bohemians. Had Jerome of Prague
known, like our Shakspeare, the virtue of an IF, or agreed with Hobbes,
that he should not have been so positive in the use of the verb IS, he
might have been spared from the flames. The philosopher of Malmsbury has
declared that "Perhaps _Judgment_ was nothing else but the composition
or joining of _two names of things, or modes_, by the verb IS." In
modern times the popes have more skilfully freed the church from this
"confusion of words." His holiness, on one occasion, standing in equal
terror of the court of France, who protected the Jesuits, and of the
court of Spain, who maintained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived a
phrase, where a comma or a full stop, placed at the beginning or the
end, purported that his holiness tolerated the opinions which he
condemned; and when the rival parties despatched deputations to the
court of Rome to plead for the period, or advocate the comma, his
holiness, in this "confusion of words," flung an unpunctuated copy to
the parties; nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if
the rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that of the
other close by a full period!

In jurisprudence much confusion has occurred in the uses of the term
_rights_; yet the social union and human happiness are involved in the
precision of the expression. When Montesquieu laid down, as the active
principle of a republic, _virtue_, it seemed to infer that a republic
was the best of governments. In the defence of his great work he was
obliged to define the term; and it seems that by _virtue_ he only meant
_political virtue_, the love of the