“Men in general are under a great mistake with regard to what is called ‘the learned world.’ They do not know, they cannot easily imagine, how little learning there is among them. I do not speak of abstruse learning, but of what all divines, at least of any note, are supposed to have, viz., the knowledge of the tongues, at least Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and of the common arts and sciences. How few men of learning, so called, understand Hebrew? Even so far as to read a plain chapter in Genesis? Nay, how few understand Greek? Make an easy experiment. Desire that grave man who is urging this objection only to tell you the English of the first paragraph that occurs in one of Plato’s Dialogues. I am afraid we may go farther still. How few understand Latin? Give one of them an Epistle of Tully [Cicero], and see how readily he will explain it, without his dictionary. … And with regard to the arts and sciences: how few understand so much as the general principles of logic? Can one in ten of the clergy (O grief of heart!) or of the Masters of Arts in either university, when an argument is brought, tell you even the mood and figure wherein it is proposed? Or complete an enthymeme? … Can one in ten of them demonstrate a problem or theorem in Euclid’s Elements? or define the common terms used in metaphysics?”
John Wesley, Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion (1743, 1745) as quoted in Stephen Westerholm and Martin Westerholm, Reading Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2016), 290 note 39.
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