CHAPTER XL. P. I.
REMARKS ON THE ART OF VERBOSITY. A RULE OF COCCEIUS, AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE LANGUAGE AND PRACTICE OF THE LAW.
If they which employ their labour and travail about the public administration of justice, follow it only as a trade, with unquenchable and unconscionable thirst of gain, being not in heart persuaded that justice is God's own work, and themselves his agents in this business,—the sentence, of right, God's own verdict, and themselves his priests to deliver it; formalities of justice do but serve to smother right; and that which was necessarily ordained for the common good, is through shameful abuse made the cause of common misery.
HOOKER.
Reader, thou mayest perhaps have thought me at times disposed to be circumambagious in my manner of narration. But now, having cast thine eyes over the Doncaster charters, even in the abridged form in which I have considerately presented them, thou knowest what a round-about style is when amplified with all possible varieties of professional tautology.
You may hear it exemplified to a certain degree, in most sermons of the current standard, whether composed by those who inflict them upon their congregation, or purchased ready made and warranted orthodox as well as original. In a still greater degree you may hear it in the extempore prayers of any meeting-house, and in those with which the so-called Evangelical Clergymen of the Establishment think proper sometimes to prologize and epilogize their grievous discourses. But in tautology the Lawyers beat the Divines hollow.
Cocceius laid it down as a fundamental rule of interpretation in theology, that the words and phrases of scripture are to be understood in every sense of which they are susceptible; that is, that they actually signify every thing that they can possibly signify. The Lawyers carry this rule farther in their profession than the Leyden Professor did in his: they deduce from words not only every thing that they can possibly signify, but sometimes a great deal more; and sometimes they make them bear a signification precisely opposite to what they were intended to express.