14 But the knowledge that the tower would never reach Heaven belonged to more than God, it belonged to the architect, Nimrod, that valiant warrior who (Moses tells us) was the first conqueror to substitute the monarchical yoke for the patriarchal independancy of the nomadic tribes; for had Nimrod believed Heaven could really be reached by a tower, he would have commenced to build, not on a flat plain, but on the summit of Ararat, or any other toplofty peak.
15 Like all overweening edifices, the tower was devized to raize a pack of lords and their followers above the heads of the commons; who were perswaded to support the superiour stance by the usual publick lie: that the overexaltation of some would in time lead to the benefit and happiness of all; but the building itself was the happiness at which the imaginations of the builders aimed, for as they gazed out across the heads of their fellows, they felt themselves to be gods; and this was the false heaven, this the bad eminence, which the True God of Heaven came down to confound, and did so most mercifully, out of the builders’ mouths.
16 For men who overmaster their own kind cannot long continue to deceive and servilize them without the cloak of a different language, by the cause that knowing little about the handling and making of solid things, and their chiefest concern being management of those who do, their speech becomes a jargoning about bonds, monopolies, legal niceties, scholastick abstractions, ostentatious sophistry, flattery, backbiting, gossip about those positioned higher than themselves and contempt of those below.
17 At last they sound so different from the commoners as to be almost unintellegible to them, and vice-versa, and this provokes the just Nemesis of God.
18 For the less they understand the suffering cries from underneath, the harder they press, in their pursuit of wealth and eminence, upon the necks of those who feed, cloath and build for them; till in tame nations an utter civil collapse ensues, and in brave ones, a revolt.
19 The most notorious modern example of Babelonian enterprize (he said) was the newmade mosque of the Bishop of Rome, pretentiously lifted up to the Glory of God, but really to the glory of an immund impanative Papacy, the funds being raized by selling pardons for crimes not yet committed, to the rich and poor sinners of Germany; which act soon split all Christendom into four times as many Christian sects as there are Christian governments.
20 He also predicted, that if the rumour hath substance, that young Lewis the French Autocrat will wall off the discontents of his people by building, outside Paris, the biggest Regal dwelling since Nero’s Golden House in Rome, then Lewis will one day perish in the same schismatick cataclysm that befel Nimrod, the Roman Caesars, and the Papal Catholicks.
21 I thank God, he concluded, that the British, at least, have proved they are not tame; and placing a finger on one side of his neck, he drew it rapidly across to the other.
22 I told him that, as a Royalist and a Scottish Knight-Baron, I could not concur in the levelling tendency of his remarks, but certainly, our habit of cultivating the recognition of our kind by a speech which makes us unintelligible to most of them, is a paradox as notorious as our habit of seeking peace by multiplying the instruments of warfare.
23 Every trade and profession fortifies its power in the state by turning its mastery into a mystery, and cultivating a jargon which is never fully disclosed to the uninitiated.
24 Even under the present Commonwealth the sckolars and grammarians, whose duty it is to increase the national stock of wisdom (that is to say, intelligible thought) so entrench and fortify themselves behind recondite polysyllabilification, that they hardly understand each other, and mean nothing to the soldier who defends them or the ploughman who grows their bread; and some such mystification must, indeed, have undermined Nimrod’s Colloseum, and scattered the first nation abroad.
25 But, said I, since that first broadcasting of mankind some 3870 years ago, two events have transformed the faith and renewed the hope of every well-informed souclass="underline" Eternal Goodness, incarnate in Christ Jesus, hath promised Heaven to whoever loves Him, and England, by embracing the experimental sciences of Lord Verulam and Galileo, is now foremost navigating nation in the whole aquaterrestrial sphere. (I might also have mentioned the Dutch, but was arguing ad hominem.)
26 The first event teaches us, that it is no longer impiety, but our sacred duty, to set our imaginations upon Heaven, and work for it, aye, even here upon this earth, providing we toyl by the light of Christian common sense: the second event makes plain, that the dispersed nations of men are becoming known to one another again, and in one or two centuries will all know each other completely, if the schisms between our separated tongues be sufficiently healed.
27 This healing can only be worked, by a universal and artificial language capable, by the conciseness and abundance of its expression, of involving the excellencies of every other; for in the passage of more than three millenia each language hath received so distinct a character, from the national genius of the many excellent spirits who have spoken and written therein, that it is now not possible to transliterate a profound truth from one speech to another, without somewhat changing the originarie sense: thus the philosophy of the Greek, which is the clearest language for subtile thought, loses as much by being expressed in Latin, the best language for distinct curt commandments, as in modern Italian, which is best for mellifluent courtierlike urbanity.
28 Only a multiverbal logopandocy can express without distorting the Dialogues of Plato, Laws of Justinian, Romances of Ariosto, and what is still to be retrieved from the languages of East and West Indians, the Civil Aztecs, Toltecs, Japaneses and Chineses.
29 I have devized this new language.
30 If widely adopted it will speed the traffick of human thought as greatly as modern navigation hath speeded traffick in commodities; for like the mercantile fleet which brings the potato, coffee, pepper, ginger, sugar and tobacco from the Americas to Europe and the Orient, and Oriental silks, muslins, tea and opium to the Americas and Europe, and European clocks, printing presses and gun-powder to everywhere, my new speech will carry the Christian message of salvation with the new European learning into pagan and heathen nations, while instructing us in the arts and sciences whereby these nations have also reconciled themselves to the Loving Wisdom of God and His Mighty Depute, Nature.
31 And truly, it is a harmonious dictat of Jehovus (he bit his lip, God, I swiftly added) that an inhabiter of Brittain should divize this language, for these Islands, which to Greeks were the last land and Ultima Thule before the arctick Pole, and to Romans an unruly colony on the verge of intransitive Ocean, is now the amphitheatrickal centre and meridial point between the cradeling paradise of mankind in the East, and those new Atlantises, some not found or founded yet, which await us in the West.
32 He aroze and paced the chamber before saying, that he himself was too inchanted by exotick learning not to be sympathically stirred by my over-splendid esteem of it, but he must open his heart to me with the words of Ecclesiastes, the preacher: For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Which truth is also to be evinced trifold from the oldest book of Holy Writ, form the life of individual men, and from universal history.