came; he served seven years for one of the daughters of Laban, and seven other years to obtain the second daughter. He fled with his wives and the flocks of his father-in-law, who pursued him. A precarious fortune, that of Jacob.

Esau is represented as wandering like Jacob. None of the twelve patriarchs, the children of Jacob, had any fixed dwelling, or a field of which they were the proprietors. They only reposed in their tents like Bedouin Arabs.

It is clear that this patriarchal life would not conveniently suit the temperature of our atmosphere. A good cultivator, such as Pignoux of Auvergne, must have a convenient house, with an aspect towards the east; large barns and stables; stalls properly built; the whole amounting to about fifty thousand francs of our present money in value. He must sow a hundred acres with corn, besides having good pastures; he should possess some acres of vineyard, and about fifty for inferior grain and herbs; thirty acres of wood; a plantation of mulberries, silk-worms, and bees. With all these advantages well economised, he can maintain a family in abundance. His land will daily improve; he will support them without fearing the irregularity of the seasons and the weight of taxes, because one good year repairs the damages of two bad ones. He will enjoy in his domain a real sovereignty which will only be subject to the laws. It is the most natural state of man; the most tranquil, the most happy, and unfortunately the most rare.

The son of this venerable patriarch seeing himself rich, is disgusted with paying the humiliating tax of the taille. Having unfortunately learned some Latin, he repairs to town, buys a post which exempts him from the tax, and which bestows nobility. He sells his domain to pay for his vanity; marries a girl brought up in luxury, who dishonours and ruins him: he dies in beggary, and his only son wears a livery in Paris.*

* Voltaire loses no opportunity of ridiculing the folly and effeminacy of a mere Parisian existence; and of showing the superiority of provincial independence. The above sketch is pleasantly filled

ECONOMY OF SPEECH

TO SPEAK BY ECONOMY.

THIS is an expression consecrated in its appropriation by the fathers of the church and even by the primitive propagators of our holy religion: it signifies the application of oratory to circumstances.

For example: St. Paul, being a christian, comes to the temple of the Jews to perform the Judaic rites, in order to show that he does not forsake the Mosaic law; he is recognised at the end of a week, and accused of having profaned the temple. Loaded with blows, he is dragged along by the mob; the tribune of the cohort (tribunis cohortis) arrives, and binds him with a double. chain. The next day this tribune assembles the council, and carries Paul before it, when the high-priest Ananias commences proceedings by giving him a box on the ear; † on which Paul salutes him with the epithet of " a whited wall."‡

"But when Paul§ perceived that the one part were sadducees and the other pharisees, he cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a pharisee, the son of a pharisee; of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question.' And when he had so said, there arose a dissension between the pharisees and the sadducees: and the multitude was divided. For the sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but the pharisees confess both."

It is very evident from the text, that Paul was not a

up in his tale of Jeanot and Colin. The slavish and impudent distinction of noble and roturier, continually brought to mind by the infamous poll-tax or taille, from which the former was free, was always exciting minor French vanity to overleap the disgusting barrier by purchase of office, title, or other empty vanities, to the eternal increase of the general corruption, and the destruction of everything manly and independent, either in sentiment or conduct.-T.

Acts of the Apostles, chap. xxi.

+ Chap. xxii.

A box on the ear among the Asiatics was a legal punishment. Even now in China, and the country beyond the Ganges, a man is condemned to a dozen boxes on the ear, or smitings of the face. § Chap. xxiii.

pharisee after he became a christian, and that there was in this affair no question either of resurrection or hope, of angel or spirit.

The text shows that Paul only spoke thus to embroil the pharisees and sadducees. This was speaking with economy, that is to say, with prudence; it was a pious artifice, which perhaps would not have been permitted to any but an apostle.

It is thus that almost all the fathers of the church have spoken" with economy." St. Jerome develops this method admirably in his fifty-fourth letter to Pammachus. Weigh his words.

After having said that there are occasions when it is necessary to present a loaf and to throw a stone, he continues thus:

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Pray read Demosthenes, read Cicero; and if these rhetoricians displease you, because their art consists in speaking of the seeming rather than the true, read Plato, Theophrastus, Xenophon, Aristotle, and all those who, having dipped into the fountain of Socrates, drew different waters from it. Is there among them any candour, any simplicity? What terms among them are not ambiguous, and what sense do they not make free with to bear away the palm of victory? Origen, Methodius, Eusebius, Apollinarus, have written a million of arguments against Celsus and Porphyry. Consider with what artifice, with what problematic subtlety they combat the spirit of the devil. They do not say what they think, but what it is expedient to say: Non quod sentiunt, sed quod necesse est dicunt. And not to mention other Latins, Tertullian, Cyprian, Minutius, Victorinus, Lactantius, and Hilarius, whom I will not cite here; I will content myself with relating the example of the apostle Paul," &c. &c.

St. Augustin often writes with economy. He so accommodates himself to time and circumstances, that in one of his epistles he confesses that he only explained the Trinity because he must say something.

Assuredly this was not because he doubted the holy Trinity; but he felt how ineffable this mystery is, and wished to content the curiosity of the people.

This method was always received in theology. It employed an argument against the Eucratics, which was the cause of triumph to the Carpocratians; and when it afterwards disputed with the Carpocratians, its arms were changed.

It is asserted that Jesus Christ died for many, when the number of rejected is set forth; but when his universal bounty is to be manifested, he is said to have died for all. Here you take the real sense for the figurative; there the figurative for the real; as prudence and expediency direct.

Such practices are not admitted in justice. A witness would be punished who told the pour and contre of a capital offence. But there is an infinite difference between vile human interests, which require the greatest clearness, and divine interests, which are hidden in an impenetrable abyss. The same judges who require indubitable demonstrative proofs, will be contented in sermons with moral proofs, and even with declamations exhibiting no proofs at all.

St. Augustin speaks with economy, when he says, "I believe, because it is absurd;-I believe, because it is impossible." These words, which would be extravagant in all worldly affairs, are very respectable in theology. They signify, that which is absurd and impossible to mortal eyes is not so to the eyes of God: God has revealed to me these pretended absurdities, these apparent impossibilities; therefore I ought to believe them.

An advocate would not be allowed to speak thus at the bar. They would shut up in a lunatic asylum a witness who might say, "I assert that the accused, while shut up in a country house in Martinique, killed a man in Paris; and I am the more certain of this homicide, because it is absurd and impossible." But revelation, miracles, and faith, are quite a distinct order of things.

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The same St. Augustin observes, in his 153d letter, It is written that the whole world belongs to the

In the 18th chapter of Proverbs, but not according to the Septuagint.

faithful, and infidels have not an obolus that they possess legitimately."

If upon this principle a brace of bankers were to wait upon me, to assure me that they were of the faithful, and in that capacity had appropriated the property belonging to me, a miserable worldling, to themselves, it is certain that they would be committed to the Chatelet, in spite of the economy of the language of St. Augustin.

St. Irenæus asserts, that we must not condemn the incest of the two daughters of Lot, nor that of Thamar with her father-in-law, because the holy scripture has not expressly declared them criminal. This verbal economy prevents not the legal punishment of incest among ourselves. It is true, that if the Lord expressly ordered people to commit incest, it would not be sinful; which is the economy of Irenæus. His laudable object is to make us respect everything in the holy scriptures; but as God has not expressly praised the foregoing doings of the daughters of Lot and of Judah, we are permitted to condemn them.

All the first christians, without exception, thought of war like the quakers and dunkers of the present day, and the bramins both ancient and modern. Tertullian is the father who who is most explicit against this legal species of murder, which our vile human nature renders expedient. "No custom, no rule," says he, can render this criminal destruction legitimate."

Nevertheless, after assuring us that no christian can carry arms, he says, "by economy," in the same book, in order to intimidate the Roman empire, "although of such recent origin, we fill your cities and your armies."

It is in the same spirit he asserts that Pilate was a christian in his heart; and the whole of his apology is filled with similar assertions, which redoubled the zeal of his proselytes.

Let us terminate these examples of the economical style, which are numberless, by a passage of St. Jerome, in his controversy with Jovian upon second mar