peace, and tends to preserve the State. Our religion does not condemn any ornament of language which serves the truth and does not presume overmuch. Nay, may not eloquence be a great blessing from God, and the trumpet of his honour, as Chrysostom calls that of St. Paul, if it be religiously bent? Those who have read the story of the early church find that eloquence in the primitive Christians overthrew great forces bent against our faith, and persuaded numbers to embrace the cause, when the power of truth was joined to force in the word. We should seek eloquence to serve God, but shun it to serve ourselves, unless we have God’s warrant. But will you thus break off communication with learned foreigners by banishing Latin, and putting her learning into your own tongue? Communication will not cease while people have cause to interchange dealings, and it may easily be continued without Latin. Already in some countries, whose languages are akin to the Latin, the learned class are weaning their tongues and pens from the use of Latin, both in written discourse and spoken disputation, to their own natural speech. It is a question not of disgracing Latin, but of gracing our own language. Why should we honour a stranger more than our own, if the purpose be served? And although, on account of the limitations of our language, no foreigner would seek to borrow from us as we do from other tongues, because we devise nothing new, though we receive the old, yet we ourselves gain very much in study by being set from the first in the privy chambers of knowledge, through the familiarity of our native speech. Justinian the emperor said to the students of law, when he gave imperial force to his Institutes, that they were most happy in the advantage of hearing the Emperor’s voice at first hand, while those of earlier times were delayed for four whole years. And does not our study of foreign languages take us fully four years? If this were the only hindrance indeed, and if we gained otherwise, we could bear the loss. But it is not only time that is lost in studying foreign tongues, though we must use them till we learn to do without them. Who can deny that we understand best in our natural speech, seeing that all our foreign learning is applied through the medium of our own language, and learning is of value only in so far as it is applied to particular uses?