[Footnote 1:  Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland (1610-1643), who was killed at the battle of Newbury in the great Civil War, was a generous patron of learning and of the literary men of his day.  He was himself a fine scholar and able writer.  Clarendon has recorded his character in the seventh book of his “History of the Great Rebellion”:  “A person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowing and obliging an humanity and goodness to mankind, that, if there were no other brand upon this odious and accursed Civil War than that single loss, it must be infamous and execrable to all posterity.”  Falkland has been made the hero of a romance by Lord Lytton. [T.  S. ] ]

And upon this account it is, that among hard words, I number likewise those which are peculiar to divinity as it is a science, because I have observed several clergymen, otherwise little fond of obscure terms, yet in their sermons very liberal of those which they find in ecclesiastical writers, as if it were our duty to understand them; which I am sure it is not.  And I defy the greatest divine to produce any law either of God or man, which obliges me to comprehend the meaning of omniscience, omnipresence, ubiquity, attribute, beatific vision, with a thousand others so frequent in pulpits, any more than that of eccentric, idiosyncracy, entity, and the like.  I believe I may venture to insist farther, that many terms used in Holy Writ, particularly by St Paul, might with more discretion be changed into plainer speech, except when they are introduced as part of a quotation.[2]

[Footnote 2:  Swift refers to this point in his “Thoughts on Religion,” and regrets that the explanation of matters of doctrine, which St. Paul expressed in the current eastern vocabulary, should have been perpetuated in terms founded on the same terminology. [T.  S.] ]

I am the more earnest in this matter, because it is a general complaint, and the justest in the world.  For a divine has nothing to say to the wisest congregation of any parish in this kingdom, which he may not express in a manner to be understood by the meanest among them.  And this assertion must be true, or else God requires from us more than we are able to perform.  However, not to contend whether a logician might possibly put a case that would serve for an exception, I will appeal to any man of letters, whether at least nineteen in twenty of those perplexing words might not be changed into easy ones, such as naturally first occur to ordinary men, and probably did so at first to those very gentlemen who are so fond of the former.