RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Stenography
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 Guenin, ut sup., and La Revue de stenographie 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
4. Use in Carthage in the year 411 (on the Church synod of Carthage cf. L. P. and E.
Councils. Guenin, ut sup.; L. P Gu6nin, in the Proces verbaux of the 8th International Congress of Stenography at Brussels, 1905; and the Revue de stenographie francaise, May and September, 1906) were preserved by stenography. The synod of St. Basil, so called because in the basilica by that name near Reims, which convened on June 17, 991, and pronounced the deposition of Arnulf , archbishop of Reims, was one of the last, if not the last, whose proceedings were thus taken down. The stenographer, in this instance, was Gerbert, who became pope under the name of Sylvester II. (q.v.).
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. Guenin, Les Notes tironiennes et la stenographie syllabique latine, Paris, 1909); nor does the shorthand art make its appearance again until a long while afterward, and then it was
5. Medie- based upon wholly different principles, val and Neither, in modern times, in France Modern at least, does the Church account sten- Disuse. ography to be so much as a very useful
aid, — not to say an indispensable adjunct. Among preachers, there are some who write their sermons and recite them; others, distrusting, doubtless, their oratorical talent and maybe, too, the skill of stenographers, try to avoid the reproduction of what they utter. So in 1851 there was a formal protest against such reports of their discourses made by such eminent preachers as Lacordaire and De Ravignan: " More than ever do we see the
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 industry, 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.
" Independently of this declaration, which they believe it their duty to render public at once, the priests undersigned reserve to themselves the right to bring lawful action against the authors of these counterfeits, and to have recourse to that ecclesiastical authority upon which devolves the punitive control of churches; with reference to the stoppage of these unworthy abuses." E. Guenin.
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. Many 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 Doddridge, p. 78, New York, 1881).
Bibliography: J. Westby-Gibson, The Bibliography of Shorthand, London, 1887; F. Fauvel-Gouraud, Practical Cosmophonography, pp. 31 sqq., New York, 1850; R. Fischer, Die Stenographie nach Geschichte, Wesen und Bedeutung, Leipsic, 1860; M. Levy, Hist. of Shorthand Writing, London, 1862; T. Anderson, Hist, of Shorthand, London, 1882; I. Pitman, Hist, of Shorthand, London, 1884; H. Moser, Allgemeine Geschichte der Stenographie, vol. i., Leipsic, 1889; M. Gitlbauer, Die drei Systeme der griechischen Tachygraphie, Vienna, 1894; K. Faulmann, Geschichte und Litteratur der Stenographie, Vienna, 1895; J. W. Zeibig, Geschichte und Literatur der Geschwindschreibkunst, new ed., Dresden, 1899; A. Cappelli, Lexicon abbreviaturarum quce in lapidibus, codicibus et chartis prcesertim mediirarvi occurrunt, Milan, 1899, Germ, transl., Leipsic, 1901 ; F. W. G. Fort, " On Old Greek Tachygraphy," in Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxi (1901), 238- 267 (provides very full bibliography) ; A. Meister, Grundriss der Geschichtswissenschaft, chap, x., Anhang 1, pp. 124-127, Leipsic, 1906 sqq.; idem, Die Geheimschrift im Diensteder papstlichen Kurie, Paderbom, 1906; A. Mentz,
Stephan Stephen