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authority was set up against authority. Some were allured by the modern,
others reverenced the ancient. The new were more enlightened, the old
were more venerable. Some adopted the comment, others stuck to the text.
The confusion increased, the mist thickened, until it could be
discovered no longer what was allowed or forbidden, what things were in
property, and what common. In this uncertainty, (uncertain even to the
professors, an Egyptian darkness to the rest of mankind), the contending
parties felt themselves more effectually ruined by the delay, than they
could have been by the injustice of any decision. Our inheritances are
become a prize for disputation; and disputes and litigations are become
an inheritance.

The professors of artificial law have always walked hand in hand with
the professors of artificial theology. As their end, in confounding the
reason of man, and abridging his natural freedom, is exactly the same,
they have adjusted the means to that end in a way entirely similar. The
divine thunders out his _anathemas_ with more noise and terror against
the breach of one of his positive institutions, or the neglect of some
of his trivial forms, than against the neglect or breach of those duties
and commandments of natural religion, which by these forms and
institutions he pretends to enforce. The lawyer has his forms, and his
positive institutions too, and he adheres to them with a veneration
altogether as religious. The worst cause cannot be so prejudicial to the
litigant, as his advocate's or attorney's ignorance or neglect of these
forms. A lawsuit is like an ill-managed dispute, in which the first
object is soon out of sight, and the parties end upon a matter wholly
foreign to that on which they began. In a lawsuit the question is, who
has a right to a certain house or farm? And this question is daily
determined, not upon the evidence of the right, but upon the observance
or neglect of some forms of words in use with the gentlemen of the robe,
about which there is even amongst themselves such a disagreement, that
the most experienced veterans in the profession can never be positively
assured that they are not mistaken.

Let us expostulate with these learned sages, these priests of the sacred
temple of justice. Are we judges of our own property? By no means. You
then, who are initiated into the mysteries of the blindfold goddess,
inform me whether I have a right to eat the bread I have earned by th