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Page 79

The style is incorrect; certain expressions appear strange; the form sometimes astonishes, yet all to no purpose; for, to counterbalance this, everything is alive with intense animation, and all because of "writer's cramp," which compelled dictation; but of this surely Jerome had no good reason to complain, if it hindered him from writing himself. The fact is, while he improvised and dictated, his thought, flowing from his lips, was taken down by the notarii and immediately " translated " to their notes, or from them; and yielded a work for immortality. As touching Augustine, eleven folio volumes (Benedictine edition, Paris, 1679-1700) are necessary for accommodating that part of his works which has been transmitted, so voluble was he.

Thus, not one author of antiquity, not Aristotle or even Cicero (though he, too, was indebted immensely to stenography), has left a bulk of documents to be compared with what is supplied by most of the Church Fathers; leaving out of account the appreciable qualification that what the years have spared constitutes but a very scanty portion of those full tides of eloquence once " taken down " by the stenographers on their waxen tablets. (On the tablets cf. the work of Gu6nin, cat sup., and La Revue de st6nographie frangaise, June, 1906.)

To the shorthand art, those who concern themselves with the history of the Church are still further indebted for documents of another class. The debates of most of the councils and synods, and, in particular, those of the Synod of ¢. Use in Carthage in the year 411 (on the

Along with the Latin language, the shorthand notes, or a system of syllabic writing once applied to Latin, become swamped in the medieval darkness (cf. E. Gu6nin, Les Notes tironiennes et la stgnographie syllabique latine, Paris, 1909); nor does the shorthand art make its appearance again until a long while afterward, and then it was

spread of enterprises aiming, as they directly announce, to publish verbatim issues of sermons, lectures, instructions, delivered in. the churches of Paris by the most celebrated preachers; and this against the express wish of these preachers, against their incontestable rights, and to the prejudice of the dignity and liberty of the sacred Word. Consequently, the priests undersigned, who more than others have had to suffer from this lamentable pndustry, avow that not only are they averse to these reproductions, but that the same are generally inexact, marred, and even so deformed as to compromise, in outward opinion, the purity of their orthodoxy and, to that extent, the authority of their mission. They declare, besides, that there has even been abuse of their names under cover of attributing to them entire discourses which they had not delivered, but which were the work of others, or had been drawn from works already printed.

Considering the amount of writing which the ordinary preacher has to produce during the year it is remarkable that so few employ any of the numerous systems of short writing which are now published. Mangy of these are very easily acquired and well adapted to his purpose. Shorthand. is more in use in Great Britain than in America, and still more so in Germany. In America shorthand is rarely practised by preachers, but not a few in cities dictate their correspondence and their sermons to professional stenographers. But, in the eighteenth century the non-conformist clergy made extensive use of the systems which had been evolved from the primitive system called Characterie, invented. by Timothy Bright, a clergyman of the Church of England, and published in 1588. The best known of the numerous writers of modifications of Bright's system is Philip Doddridge (q.v.), who not only himself wrote Rich's system (1699) but made its learning obligatory on all the students of his academy (C. Stanford, Philip Dodc'ridge, p. 78, New York, 1881).