is improved by being exercised” Again:  “The loving of our enemies is a divine command; Or, loving our enemies [is a divine command].”—­Ibid. Both of these are also wrong.  Say, “‘Love your enemies,’ is a divine command.”  Or, “We are divinely commanded to love our enemies.”  Some are apt to jumble together the active voice and the passive, and thus destroy the unity even of a short sentence; as, “By exercising our memories, they are improved.”—­Kirkham’s Gram., p. 226 and 195.  “The error might have been avoided by repeating the substantive.”—­Murray’s Gram., p. 172.  “By admitting such violations of established grammatical distinctions, confusion would be introduced.”—­Ib., p. 187.  In these instances, we have an active participle without an agent; and this, by the preposition by, is made an adjunct to a passive verb.  Even the participial noun of this form, though it actually drops the distinction of voice, is awkward and apparently incongruous in such a relation.

OBS. 11.—­When the verbal noun necessarily retains any adjunct of the verb or participle, it seems proper that the two words be made a compound by means of the hyphen:  as, “Their hope shall be as the giving-up of the ghost.”—­Job, xi, 20.  “For if the casting-away of them be the reconciling of the world.”—­Rom., xi, 15.  “And the gathering-together of the waters called he seas.”—­Gen., i, 10.  “If he should offer to stop the runnings-out of his justice.”—­Law and Grace, p. 26.  “The stopping-short before the usual pause in the melody, aids the impression that is made by the description of the stone’s stopping-short.’”—­Kames, El. of Crit., ii, 106.  I do not find these words united in the places referred to, but this is nevertheless their true figure.  Our authors and printers are lamentably careless, as well as ignorant, respecting the figure of words:  for which part of grammar, see the whole of the third chapter, in Part First of this work; also observations on the fourth rule of syntax, from the 30th to the 35th.  As certain other compounds may sometimes be broken by tmesis, so may some of these; as, “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is.”—­Heb., x, 23.  Adverbs may relate to participles, but nouns require adjectives.  The following phrase is therefore inaccurate:  “For the more easily reading of large numbers.”  Yet if we say, “For reading large numbers the more easily,” the construction is different, and not inaccurate.  Some calculator, I think, has it, “For the more easily reading large numbers.”  But Hutton says, “For the more easy reading of large numbers.”—­Hutton’s Arith., p. 5; so Babcock’s, p. 12.  It would be quite as well to say, “For the greater ease in reading large numbers.”