Richard Chenevix Trench

“ The fact that so many words implying knowledge, art, skill, obtain in course of time a secondary meaning of crooked knowledge, art that has degenerated into artifice, skill used only to circumvent, which meanings partially or altogether put out of use their primary, is a mournful witness to the way in which intellectual gifts are too commonly misapplied. Thus there was a time when the Latin ‘dolus’ required the epithet ‘malus,’ as often as it signified a treacherous or fraudful device ”

“ An infinite deal of labour there is to lade out the water that riseth upon the workmen, for fear it choke up the pits; for to prevent which inconvenience they derive it by other drains.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals. ”

“ Every sin smiles in the first address, and carries light in the face, and honey in the lip; but when we have well drunk, then comes that which is worse, a whip with ten strings, fears and terrors of conscience, and shame and displeasure, and a caitiff disposition, and diffidence in the day of death.—Bishop Taylor, Life of Christ.
That affliction grew heavy upon me, and weighed me down even to a diffidence of God’s mercy.—Donne, Sermons, 1640, vol. ”

“ Good Humour is not only the best security against enthusiasm, but the best foundation of piety and true religion. For if right thoughts and worthy apprehensions of the Supreme Being are fundamental to all true worship and adoration, ’tis more than probable we shall never miscarry in this respect except through Ill Humour only.—Shaftesbury, Works, 1727, vol. ”

“ A striking evidence of the extreme likelihood that he who has no restraints on his belief will ere long have none upon his life, is given by this word ‘libertine.’ Applied at first to certain heretical sects, and intended to mark the licentious liberty of their creed, ‘libertine’ soon let go altogether its relation to what a man believed, and acquired the sense which it now has, a ‘libertine’ being one who has released himself from all moral restraints, and especially in his relations with the other sex. ”

“ If a great personage undertakes an action passionately and upon great interest, let him manage it indiscreetly, let the whole design be unjust, let it be acted with all the malice and impotency in the world, he shall have enough to flatter him, but not enough to reprove him.—Bishop Taylor, Holy Living, c. ”

“ The tendency which there is in the meaning of words to run to the surface, till they lose and leave behind all their deeper significance, is well exemplified in ‘civil’ and ‘civility’—words of how deep an import once, how slight and shallow now. ”

“ Temper. What has been said under ‘Humour,’ which see, will also explain ‘Temper,’ and the earlier uses of it which we meet. The happy ‘temper’ would be the happy mixture, the blending in due proportions, of the four principal ‘humours’ of the body.
The exquisiteness of his [the Saviour’s] bodily temper increased the exquisiteness of his torment, and the ingenuity of his soul added to his sensibleness of the indignities and affronts offered to him.—Fuller, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, vol. i. p. 345.
Concupiscence itself follows the crasis and temperature of the body. ”

“ The devil can act upon the soul by suggesting the ideas and spiritual pictures of things to the imagination. For this is the grand repository of all the ideas and representations which the mind of man can work either upon or by. So that Satan, our skilful artist, can as easily slide his injections into the fancy as present a deluding image to the eye.—South, Sermons, 1737, vol. ”

“ Scholars of the seventeenth century often employ a word of their own language in the same latitude which its equivalent possessed in the Greek or the Latin; as though it entered into all the rights of its equivalent, and corresponded with it on all points, because it corresponded in one. ”

“ No; the atheist is too wise in his generation to make remonstrances and declarations of what he thinks. It is his heart and the little council that is held there, that is only privy to his monstrous opinions.—South, Sermons, 1744, vol. ix. p. 78.
In ‘remorseless’ and in the phrase ‘without remorse,’ we retain a sense of ‘remorse’ as equivalent with pity, which otherwise has quite passed away from it. It may thus have acquired this meaning. There is nothing which is followed in natures not absolutely devilish with so swift revulsion of mind as acts of cruelty. ”

“ Wiclif.
Tinsel. This (the Old French ‘estincelle,’ a spark) is always now cheap finery, flashing like silver and gold, but at the same time pretending a value and a richness which it does not really possess. There lay no such insinuation of pretentious splendour in its earlier uses. A valuable note in Keightley’s Milton, vol. i. p. 126, makes it, I think, clear that by ‘tinsel’ was commonly meant ‘a silver texture, less dense and stout than cloth of silver;’ yet not always, for see my first quotation. ”

“ There is not so great difference and distance between beast and beast, as there is odds in the matter of wisdom, discourse of reason, and use of memory between man and man.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. ”

“ To amuse, to stop or stay one with a trifling story, to make him lose his time, to feed with vain expectations, to hold in play.—Phillips, New World of Words.
In a just way it is lawful to deceive the unjust enemy, but not to lie; that is, by stratagems and semblances of motions, by amusements and intrigues of actions, by ambushes and wit, by simulation and dissimulation.—Bishop Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, b. ”

“ That there is some particular or restrained seat of the common sense is an opinion that even all philosophers and physicians are agreed upon. And it is an ordinary comparison amongst them, that the external senses and the common sense considered together are like a circle with five lines drawn from the circumference to the centre. ”

“ Any one now invited to define a ‘restive’ horse would certainly put into his definition that it was one with too much motion; but in obedience to its etymology ‘restive’ would have once meant one with too little; determined to stand still when it ought to go forward. [It is the Old French restif, stubborn, drawing backward (see Cotgrave) , from rester, Latin restare, to stand still.] Immobile, lazy, stubborn, are the three stages of meaning which the word went through, before it reached the fourth and present. ”

“ An authentic book is that which relates matters of fact as they really happened.’ Of ‘authentic’ he has certainly not seized the true force, neither do the uses of it by good writers bear him out. The true opposite to αὐθεντικός in Greek is ἀδέσποτος, and ‘authentic’ is properly original, independent, and thus coming with authority, authoritative.6 Thus, an ‘authentic’ document is, in its first meaning, a document written by the proper hand of him from whom it professes to proceed. ”

“ Be not prodigal of your time on earth, which is so little in your power. ’Tis so precious a thing that it is to be redeemed; ’tis therefore too precious to be embezzled and trifled away.—Howe, The Redeemer’s Dominion over the Invisible World. ”

“ In my citations I have throughout acted on the principle that ‘Enough is as good as a feast:’ and that this same ‘Enough,’ as the proverb might well be completed, ‘is better than a surfeit.’ So soon as that earlier meaning, from which our present is a departure, or which once subsisted side by side with our present, however it has now disappeared, has been sufficiently established, I have held my hand, and not brought further quotations in proof. ”

“ Any walking by sense and sight rather than by faith was ‘sensuality’ of old.
Hath not the Lord Jesus convinced thy sensual heart by sensual arguments? If thy sense were not left-handed, thou [Pg 249] mightest with thy right hand bear down thine infidelity; for God hath given assurance sufficient by his Son to thy very sense, if though wert not brutish (1 John i. 1) .—Rogers, Naaman the Syrian, p. 493.
There cannot always be that degree of sensual, pungent, or delectable affections towards religion as towards the desires of nature and sense.—Bishop Taylor, Life of Christ, part ii. ”

“ When good-nature is heightened by the grace of God, that which was natural becomes now spiritual.—Bishop Taylor, Sermon preached at the Funeral of Sir George Dalstone.
Good-nature! alas, where is it? Since Adam fell, there was never any such thing in rerum naturâ; if there be any good thing in any man, it is all from grace. We may talk of this and that, of good-natured men, and I know not what; but the very truth is, set grace aside (I mean all grace, both [Pg 124] renewing grace and restraining grace) , there is no more good-nature in any man than there was in Cain and in Judas. ”

“ The only way to obtain ‘copy’ (in this Latin sense) or abundance of any document, would be by taking ‘copies’ (in our present sense) of it. Then, too, it often meant the exemplar, and is so used in the quotations from Shakespeare and Jeremy Taylor.
We cannot follow a better pattern for elocution than God Himself. Therefore He using divers words in his Holy Writ, and indifferently for one thing in nature, we may use the same liberty in our English versions out of Hebrew or Greek, for that copy or store that He hath given us.—The Translators [of the Bible, 1611] to the Reader. ”

“ We have forfeited the full force of the statement, ‘God is no respecter of persons;’ from the fact that ‘person’ does not mean for us now all that it once meant. ‘Person,’ from ‘persona,’ the mask constantly worn by the actor of antiquity, is by natural transfer the part or rôle in the play which each sustains, as πρόσωπον is in Greek. In the great tragi-comedy of life each sustains a ‘person;’ one that of a king, another that of a peasant ”

“ There lies ever in ‘obsequious’ at the present the sense of an observance which is overdone, of an unmanly readiness to fall in with the will of another; there lay nothing of this in the Latin ‘obsequium,’ nor yet in our English word as employed two centuries ago. See the quotation from Feltham, s. v. ‘Garb.’
Besides many other fishes in divers places, which are very obeisant and obsequious, when they be called by their names.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. ”