But when the later Friends raised _their_ protest, the case
was altogether different. The false gods whose names were bound up in
these words had ceased to be worshipped in England for about a thousand
years; the words had wholly disengaged themselves from their
etymologies, of which probably not one in a thousand had the slightest
suspicion. Moreover, had these precisians in speech been consistent,
they could not have stopped where they did. Every new acquaintance with
the etymology or primary use of words would have entangled them in some
new embarrassment, would have required a new purging of their
vocabulary. 'To charm,' 'to bewitch,' 'to fascinate,' 'to enchant,'
would have been no longer lawful words for those who had outlived the
belief in magic, and in the power of the evil eye; nor 'lunacy,' nor
'lunatic,' for such as did not count the moon to have anything to do
with mental unsoundness; nor 'panic' fear, for those who believed that
the great god Pan was indeed dead; nor 'auguries,' nor 'auspices,' for
those to whom divination was nothing; while to speak of 'initiating' a
person into the 'mysteries' of an art, would have been utterly
heathenish language. Nay, they must have found fault with the language
of Holy Scripture itself; for a word of honourable use in the New
Testament expressing the function of an interpreter, and reappearing in
our 'hermeneutics,' is directly derived from and embodies the name of
Hermes, a heathen deity, and one who did not, like Woden, Thor, and
Friga, pertain to a long extinct mythology, but to one existing in its
strength at the very time when he wrote.
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