of inferior success to Pascal's. Former ages had, indeed, witnessed even a more melancholy logomachy, in the _Homoousion_ and the _Homoiousion_! An event which Boileau has immortalised by some fine verses, which, in his famous satire on _L'Equivoque_, for reasons best known to the Sorbonne, were struck out of the text. D'une _syllabe_ impie un saint _mot_ augmente Remplit tous les esprits d'aigreurs si meurtrieres-- Tu fis, dans une guerre et si triste et si longue, Perir tant de Chretiens, _martyrs d'une diphthongue_! Whether the Son was similar to the substance of the Father, or of the same substance, depended on the diphthong _oi_, which was alternately rejected and received. Had they earlier discovered, what at length they agreed on, that the words denoted what was incomprehensible, it would have saved thousands, as a witness describes, "from 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!