as from a description of the river
Nile in Egypt; or if they are to discourse of the mystery of the Cross,
they shall begin with a story of Bell and the Dragon; or perchance if
their subject be of fasting, for an entrance to their sermon they shall
pass through the twelve signs of the zodiac; or lastly, if they are to
preach of faith, they shall address themselves in a long mathematical
account of the quadrature of the circle. I myself once heard a great
fool (a great scholar I would have said) undertaking in a laborious
discourse to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity; in the unfolding
whereof, that he might shew his wit and reading, and together satisfy
itching ears, he proceeded in a new method, as by insisting on the
letters, syllables, and proposition, on the concord of noun and verb,
and that of noun substantive, and noun adjective; the auditors all
wondered, and some mumbled to themselves that hemistitch of Horace,

Why all this needless trash?

But at last he brought it thus far, that he could demonstrate the
whole Trinity to be represented by these first rudiments of grammar,
as clearly and plainly as it was possible for a mathematician to draw a
triangle in the sand: and for the making of this grand discovery, this
subtle divine had plodded so hard for eight months together, that he
studied himself as blind as a beetle, the intenseness of the eye of his
understanding overshadowing and extinguishing that of his body; and yet
he did not at all repent him of his blindness, but thinks the loss of
his sight an easy purchase for the gain of glory and credit.

[Illustration: 294]

I heard at another time a grave divine, of fourscore years of age at
least, so sour and hard-favoured, that one would be apt to mistrust that
it was Scotus Redivivus; he taking upon him to treat of the mysterious
name, JESUS, did very subtly pretend that in the very letters was
contained, whatever could be said of it: for first, its being declined
only with three cases, did expressly point out the trinity of persons,
then that the nominative ended in S, the accusative in M, and the
ablative in U, did imply some unspeakable mystery, viz., that in words
of those initial letters Christ was the _summus_, or beginning, the
_medius_, or middle, and the _ultimus_, or end of all things. There was
yet a more abstruse riddle to be explained, which was by dividing the
word JESUS into two parts, and separating the S in the middle from the