In Praise of Folly
the exercise of faith, and the offices of charity: I cannot own such as
depend on their own merits without a reliance on my mercy: as many of
you therefore as trust to the broken reeds of your own deserts may even
go search out a new heaven, for you shall never enter into that, which
from the foundations of the world was prepared only for such as are true
of heart. When these monks and friars shall meet with such a shameful
repulse, and see that ploughmen and mechanics are admitted into that
kingdom, from which they themselves are shut out, how sneakingly will
they look, and how pitifully slink away? Yet till this last trial they
had more comfort of a future happiness, because more hopes of it than
any other men. And these persons are not only great in their own eyes,
but highly esteemed and respected by others, especially those of the
order of mendicants, whom none dare to offer any affront to, because
as confessors they are intrusted with all the secrets of particular
intrigues, which they are bound by oath not to discover; yet many times,
when they are almost drunk, they cannot keep their tongue so far within
their head, as not to be babbling out some hints, and shewing themselves
so full, that they are in pain to be delivered. If any person give them
the least provocation they will sure to be revenged of him, and in their
next public harangue give him such shrewd wipes and reflections, that
the whole congregation must needs take notice at whom they are levelled;
nor will they ever desist from this way of declaiming, till their mouth
be stopped with a bribe to hold their tongue. All their preaching is
mere stage-playing, and their delivery the very transports of ridicule
and drollery. Good Lord! how mimical are their gestures? What heights
and falls in their voice? What toning, what bawling, what singing, what
squeaking, what grimaces, making of mouths, apes' faces, and distorting
of their countenance; and this art of oratory as a choice mystery,
they convey down by tradition to one another. The manner of it I may
adventure thus farther to enlarge upon. First, in a kind of mockery
they implore the divine assistance, which they borrowed from the solemn
custom of the poets: then if their text suppose be of charity, they
shall take their exordium as far off 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.
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
two extreme syllables, making a kind of pentameter, the word consisting
of five letters: and this intermedial S being in the Hebrew alphabet
called sin, which in the English language signifies what the Latins term
_peecatum_, was urged to imply that the holy Jesus should purify us
from all sin and wickedness. Thus did the pulpiteer cant, while all the
congregation, especially the brotherhood of divines, were so surprised
at his odd way of preaching, that wonder served them, as grief did
Niobe, almost turned them into stones. I among the rest (as Horace
describes Priapus viewing the enchantments of the two sorceresses,
Canidia and Sagane) could no longer contain, but let fly a cracking
report of the operation it had upon me. These impertinent introductions
are not without reason condemned; for of old, whenever Demosthenes among
the Greeks, or Tully among the Latins, began their orations with so
great a digression from the matter in hand, it was always looked upon
as improper and unelegant, and indeed, were such a long-fetched exordium
any token of a good invention, shepherds and ploughmen might lay claim
to the title of men of greatest parts, since upon any argument it is
easiest for them to talk what is least to the purpose. These preachers
think their preamble (as we may well term it), to be the most
fashionable, when it is farthest from the subject they propose to treat
of, while each auditor sits and wonders what they drive at, and many
times mutters out the complaint of Virgil:--
_Whither does all this jargon tend?_ In the third place, when they come
to the division of their text, they shall give only a very short touch
at the interpretation of the words, when the fuller explication of their
sense ought to have been their only province. Fourthly, after they are
a little entered, they shall start some theological queries, far enough
off from the matter in hand, and bandy it about pro and con till they
lose it in the heat of scuffle. And here they shall cite their doctors
invincible, subtle, seraphic, cherubic, holy, irrefragable, and such
like great names to confirm their several assertions. Then out they
bring their syllogisms, their majors, their minors, conclusions,
corollaries, suppositions, and distinctions, that will sooner
terrify the congregation into an amazement, than persuade them into
a conviction. Now comes the fifth act, in which they must exert their
utmost skill to come off with applause. Here therefore they fall a
telling some sad lamentable story out of their legend, or some
other fabulous history, and this they descant upon allegorically,
tropologically, and analogically; and so they draw to a conclusion of
their discourse, which is a more brain-sick chimera than ever Horace
could describe in his _De Arte Poetica_, when he began:--
_Humano Capitis &c_. Their praying is altogether as ridiculous as their
preaching; for imagining that in their addresses to heaven they should
set out in a low and tremulous voice, as a token of dread and reverence,
they begin therefore with such a soft whispering as if they were afraid
any one should overhear what they said; but when they are gone a little
way, they clear up their pipes by degrees, and at last bawl out so loud
as if, with Baal's priests, they were resolved to awake a sleeping god;
and then again, being told by rhetoricians that heights and falls, and a
different cadency in pronunciation, is a great advantage to the setting
off any thing that is spoken, they will sometimes as it were mutter
their words inwardly, and then of a sudden hollo them out, and be sure
at last, in such a flat, faltering tone as if their spirits were spent,
and they had run themselves out of breath. Lastly, they have read
that most systems of rhetoric treat of the art of exciting laughter;
therefore for the effecting of this they will sprinkle some jests and
puns that must pass for ingenuity, though they are only the froth and
folly of affectedness. Sometimes they will nibble at the wit of being
satyrical, though their utmost spleen is so toothless, that they suck
rather than bite, tickle rather than scratch or wound: nor do they ever
flatter more than at such times as they pretend to speak with greatest
freedom.
Finally, all their actions are so buffoonish and mimical, that any
would judge they had learned all their tricks of mountebanks and
stage-players, who in action it is true may perhaps outdo them, but
in oratory there is so little odds between both, that it is hard to
determine which seems of longest standing in the schools of eloquence.
Yet these preachers, however ridiculous, meet with such hearers, who
admire them as much as the people of Athens did Demosthenes, or the
citizens of Rome could do Cicero: among which admirers are chiefly
shopkeepers, and women, whose approbation and good opinion they only
court; because the first, if they are humoured, give them some snacks
out of unjust gain; and the last come and ease their grief to them upon
all pinching occasions, especially when their husbands are any ways
cross or unkind.
Thus much I suppose may suffice to make you sensible how much these
cell-hermits and recluses are indebted to my bounty; who when they
tyrannize over the consciences of the deluded laity with fopperies,
juggles, and impostures, yet think themselves as eminently pious as St.
Paul, St. Anthony, or any other of the saints; but these stage-divines,
not less ungrateful dis-owners of their obligations to folly, than they
are impudent pretenders to the profession of piety, I willingly take my
leave of, and pass now to kings, princes, and courtiers, who paying me
a devout acknowledgment, may justly challenge back the respect of being
mentioned and taken notice of by me. And first, had they wisdom enough
to make a true judgment of things, they would find their own condition
to be more despicable and slavish than that of the most menial subjects.
For certainly none can esteem perjury or parricide a cheap purchase
for a crown, if he does but seriously reflect on that weight of cares a
princely diadem is loaded with. He that sits at the helm of government
acts in a public capacity, and so must sacrifice all private interest
to the attainment of the common good; he must himself be conformable to
those laws his prerogative exacts, or else he can expect no obedience
paid them from others; he must have a strict eye over all his inferior
magistrates and officers, or otherwise it is to be doubted they will but
carelessly discharge their respective duties. Every king, within his own
territories, is placed for a shining example as it were in the firmament
of his wide-spread dominions, to prove either a glorious star of benign
influence, if his behaviour be remarkably just and innocent, or else
to impend as a threatening comet, if his blazing power be pestilent and
hurtful. Subjects move in a darker sphere, and so their wanderings and
failings are less discernible; whereas princes, being fixed in a more
exalted orb, and encompassed with a brighter dazzling lustre, their