8 I hid my surprize, by suavely thanking him for anticipating me, and asking, How God had worked to confound the first speech he had given men to use? Was the Latin Secretary of the British Republick one of those who believed Jehovah had miraculously and simultaneously infused, into the Babelbuilders’ brains, entirely differing sets of grammars and vocabularies?
9 He answered saying, No; he agreed with the Rabins, that the first confusion was of accent meerly, the foundation speech of these accents not deeply changing, until by dispersal around all the earth, the scattered nations of men were divided one from another by almost impassible distances of desert wilderness, mountain chains and nearly non-navigable seas: for each nation encountering different soyls, plants, creatures and climates, was compelled to devize new tools, arts and oeconomies to cultivate them, new sciences to understand them, new words to describe them, so that in time, lacking all written records, the old verbal tokens of our common oeconomy on Shinar’s plain were by new speech utterly ousted and submerged, leaving one accurate account of the paleological confusion among a people living near the place where it happened, the rest retaining bur foggy legends of a primitive catastrophe.
10 Then it behoves us to enquire (said I) how God, operating within one single city-state on Shinar’s plain, came to stunt that great work by diversity of accent; for you and I are rational not superstitious men; we know God works His changes on earth by the agency of nature, his deputy magistrate, who in men is called human nature: what fact of human nature made men inarticulate to one another, who were united in a great project which, while certainly presumptuous, would otherwise have succeeded?
11 To this he replied, The desire for supremacy over their own kind.
12 I had intended, by a skilled deployment of Socratic questioning, to educt from his own lips conclusions which were precisely my own; his answer was so unexpected that I responded to it with open mouth and arched eyebrows, which he interpreted as an invitation to explicate.
13 We may only understand these nine verses rightly, said he, if we remember two things: firstly, that when Jehovah said, Nothing will be restrained from men, which they have imagined to do, He was speaking ironically to his Angels, for although the Almighty had not read the astronomy of Signor Galileo, He well knew the Grandeur of the Heavens He had Builded, and knew that they were far beyond the reach of any earthly construction; had the tower rizen one or two short miles above the surface of the plain it would have entered a region of air too rarified to support human nourishment; if this tremendous irony is forgot, then God’s words sound like the peevish pronuncimentos of a meer absolute Monarch, who dreads that his people will usurp his privelege.
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.