learned readings:  eagle stood against eagle:  authority was set up against authority.  Some were allured by the modern, others reverenced the ancient.  The new were more enlightened, the old were more venerable.  Some adopted the comment, others stuck to the text.  The confusion increased, the mist thickened, until it could be discovered no longer what was allowed or forbidden, what things were in property, and what common.  In this uncertainty, (uncertain even to the professors, an Egyptian darkness to the rest of mankind), the contending parties felt themselves more effectually ruined by the delay, than they could have been by the injustice of any decision.  Our inheritances are become a prize for disputation; and disputes and litigations are become an inheritance.

The professors of artificial law have always walked hand in hand with the professors of artificial theology.  As their end, in confounding the reason of man, and abridging his natural freedom, is exactly the same, they have adjusted the means to that end in a way entirely similar.  The divine thunders out his anathemas with more noise and terror against the breach of one of his positive institutions, or the neglect of some of his trivial forms, than against the neglect or breach of those duties and commandments of natural religion, which by these forms and institutions he pretends to enforce.  The lawyer has his forms, and his positive institutions too, and he adheres to them with a veneration altogether as religious.  The worst cause cannot be so prejudicial to the litigant, as his advocate’s or attorney’s ignorance or neglect of these forms.  A lawsuit is like an ill-managed dispute, in which the first object is soon out of sight, and the parties end upon a matter wholly foreign to that on which they began.  In a lawsuit the question is, who has a right to a certain house or farm?  And this question is daily determined, not upon the evidence of the right, but upon the observance or neglect of some forms of words in use with the gentlemen of the robe, about which there is even amongst themselves such a disagreement, that the most experienced veterans in the profession can never be positively assured that they are not mistaken.

Let us expostulate with these learned sages, these priests of the sacred temple of justice.  Are we judges of our own property?  By no means.  You then, who are initiated into the mysteries of the blindfold goddess, inform me whether I have a right to eat the bread I have earned by the hazard of my life or the sweat of my brow?  The grave doctor answers me in the affirmative; the reverend serjeant replies in the negative; the learned barrister reasons upon one side and upon the other, and concludes nothing.  What shall I do?  An antagonist starts up and presses me hard.  I enter the field, and retain these three persons to defend my cause.  My cause, which two farmers from the plough could have decided in half an hour, takes the court twenty years.