You possess some of the qualities essential to the orator; you are voluble of speech and impressive in your delivery, and you have that confidence in the powers of your own mind, which secures you from hesitation and embarrassment: but you are deficient in others, without which all is unavailing; your perception is obscure, and your ratiocination singularly defective; and you are peculiarly unfortunate in the belief that you excel in that faculty in which you are most deficient. Hence we find you plunging into the fathomless depths of metaphysics with fearless confidence; stating propositions and assuming inferences in direct opposition to them, and such is your fondness for amplification, that even when the truth of your proposition is self-evident, you contrive to involve it in obscurity by the redundancy of your expletives, and the profusion of your attempts at illustration. You contemn all human science, for you are ignorant; yet from the whole body of ministers of that society of which you are still a member, you cannot select an individual who makes such a lofty display of technical terms, or more frequently endeavours to elucidate his observations by reference to it. You believe in the doctrine of inspiration, and you seem to claim the possession of it to a degree with which few are favoured: you say it is an unerring director, and plainly to be understood, and yet declare that all its dictates must be governed by the fallible reason of man. Having given to reason this unlimited dictatorship, it was natural to expect that you would recommend the most assiduous cultivation of it; but you have interdicted the only means by which it is improved, and denounced by a curse those who are engaged in extending it.[3] Footnote 3: See discourses delivered in Philadelphia, page 53. "Oh that men of science might be aware what a curse they are to the inhabitants of the earth; what a great curse." There is no novelty in this opinion, for we find a poet more than two hundred years ago making Jack Cade exclaim, "thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm, in erecting a grammar school: and whereas before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper mill. It will be proved to thy face, that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no christian can endure to hear."