t enlighteneth the blindness of our sinful hearts to tread
the ways of wisdom, and lead our feet into the land of blessing"{30}.
This is not stiffer than the ordinary English of his time. I would
suggest to you at your leisure to make these two experiments; you will
find it, I think, exactly as I have here affirmed.

While thus I bring before you the fact that it would be quite possible
to write English, forgoing altogether the use of the Latin portion of
the language, I would not have you therefore to conclude that this
portion of the language is of little value, or that we could draw from
the resources of our Teutonic tongue efficient substitutes for all the
words which it has contributed to our glossary. I am persuaded that we
could not; and, if we could, that it would not be desirable. I mention
this, because there is sometimes a regret expressed that we have not
kept our language more free from the admixture of Latin, a suggestion
made that we should even now endeavour to keep under the Latin element
of it, and as little as possible avail ourselves of it. I remember Lord
Brougham urging upon the students at Glasgow as a help to writing good
English, that they should do their best to rid their diction of
long-tailed words in 'osity' and 'ation'{31}. He plainly intended to
indicate by this phrase all learned Latin words, or words derived from
the Latin. This exhortation is by no means superfluous; for doubtless
there were writers of a former age, Samuel Johnson in the last century,
Henry More and Sir Thomas Browne in the century preceding, who gave
undue preponderance to the learned, or Latin, portion in our language;
and very much of its charm, of its homely strength and beauty, of its
most popular and truest idioms, would have perished from it, had they
succeeded in persuading others to write as they had written.

{Sidenote: _Anglo-Saxon Aboriginal_}

But for all this we could _almost_ as ill spare this side of the
language as the other. It represents and supplies needs not less real
than the other does. Philosophy and science and the arts of a high
civilization find their utterance in the Latin words of our language,
or, if not in the Latin, in the Greek, which for present purposes may be
grouped with them. How they should have found utterance in the speech of
rude tribes, which, never having cultivated the things, must needs have
been without the words which should express those things. Granting too
that, _coet