Wesley Corpus

Nevertheless, there is room to doubt even of their understanding; nay, one of the arguments often brought to prove the greatness, to me clearly demon strates the littleness, of it; namely, the thirty thousand letters of their alphabet. To keep an alphabet of thirty hundred letters could never be reconciled to common sense; since every alphabet ought to be as short, simple, and easy as possible. No more can we reconcile to any degree of common sense, their crippling all the women in the empire, by a silly, senseless affectation of squeezing their feet till they bear no proportion to their bodies; so that the feet of a woman at thirty must still be as small as they would be naturally when four years old. But in order to see the true measure of their understanding in the clearest light, let us look, not at women, or the vulgar, but at the Nobility, the wisest, the politest part of the nation. Look at the Mandarins, the glory of the empire, and see any, every one of them at his meals, not deigning to use his own hands, but having his meat put into his mouth by two servants, planted for that purpose, one on his right hand, the other on his left | O the deep understanding of the noble lubber that sits in the midst, and Hiat, ceu pullus hirundinis / “Gapes, as the young swallow, for his food.” Surely an English ploughman, or a Dutch sailor, would have too much sense to endure it. If you say, “Nay, the Mandarin would not endure it, but that it is a custom ;” I answer, Undoubtedly it is; but how came it to be a custom? Such a custom could not have begun, much less have become gene ral, but through a general and marvellous want of common Sense. What their learning is now, I know not; but notwithstand ing their boast of its antiquity, it was certainly very low and contemptible in the last century, when they were so astonished at the skill of the French Jesuits, and honoured them as almost more than human, for calculating eclipses !