Text Sparring

The diversity of Christian sects has been greatly multiplied by different religionists framing some exclusive creed on unconnected sentences and isolated texts. The mysteries which these spiritual lynxes detect in the simplest passages, which they twist and torture, remind one of the five hundred nondescripts, each as large as his own black cat, which Dr. Katerfelto, by aid of his solar microscope, discovered in a drop of transparent water. Let those who are in danger of this polemical infection, attend to the following golden aphorism of one of our oldest and most orthodox divines. "Sentences in Scripture," says Dr. Donne, "like hairs in horsetails, concur in one root of beauty and strength; being plucked out, one by one, serve only for springs and snares."--Anon