misunderstanding and misconstruction now; but still they
did not mean at the first, and therefore do not now really mean, any
more than, "with my body I thee _honour_", and so you may reply to any
fault-finder here.

Take another example of a very easy misapprehension, although not now
from Scripture or the Prayer Book, Fuller, our Church historian, having
occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims,
"Oh the _painfulness_ of his preaching!" If we did not know the former
uses of 'painfulness', we might take this for an exclamation wrung out
at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his
hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the _pain_ which he
caused to others, but of the _pains_ which he bestowed himself: and I am
persuaded, if we had more 'painful' preachers in the old sense of the
word, that is, who _took_ pains themselves, we should have fewer
'painful' ones in the modern sense, who _cause_ pain to their hearers.
So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as "the _painful_ writer of two
hundred books"--not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the
reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.

Here is another easy misapprehension. Swift wrote a pamphlet, or, as he
called it, a _Letter to the Lord Treasurer_, with this title, "A
proposal for correcting, improving, and _ascertaining_ the English
Tongue". Who that brought a knowledge of present English, and no more,
to this passage, would doubt that "_ascertaining_ the English Tongue"
meant arriving at a certain knowledge of what it was? Swift, however,
means something quite different from this. "_To ascertain_ the English
tongue" is not with him to arrive at a subjective certainty in our own
minds of what that tongue is, but to give an objective certainty to that
tongue itself, so that henceforth it shall not alter nor change. For
even Swift himself, with all his masculine sense, entertained a dream
of this kind, as is more fully declared in the work itself{205}.

{Sidenote: '_Treacle_'}

In other places unacquaintance with the changes in a word's usage will
not so much mislead as leave you nearly or altogether at a loss in
respect of the intention of an author whom you may be reading. It is
evident that he has a meaning, but what it is you are unable to divine,
even though all the words he employs are words in familiar employment to
the present day. For example, the poet Waller is c