course it may be said that the text does not assert those names to be the veritable names at first applied to those persons, but only that their appellations, in whatever language given, signified so and so. There is, however, no intimation of any such idea, but rather that those and all the names given to persons and places among the first inhabitants of earth, were really what they are stated to have been; and the very nature of the case in relation to the words thus employed, implies that they are not to be regarded as translations, but as the words originally used. This argument for the primal antiquity of Hebrew is approved by many learned authorities, even though not receiving the Hebrew narrative with implicit credence as of Divine origin. Buxtorf has laboured to prove, on intrinsic grounds, that this language was imparted to the first parents of mankind by God Himself; and certainly those who deem the Book of Genesis written under Divine inspiration will experience no difficulty in adopting Buxtorf's conclusion, since the book itself seems to assume, if it does not assert, the fact. And it is only on the presumption that the Maker of man has never verbally revealed anything to man concerning his own origin and his relationship to heaven and earth, that the literal truth of that book, so far as 'the Word in the words' is concerned, can be invalidated; for if that book do not contain that verbal revelation, neither does any other, and man knows nothing about what he is most concerned to know--the end for which he was created,

and his necessary moral relation to his Creator from his beginning. That Hebrew is the most ancient of tongues may also be inferred from the fact that, as the Gomeric, either in its Cymric or Celtic types, underlies Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, Egyptian, Gothic, Lithuanian, and Sclavonian,* so Hebrew underlies the Gomeric as well as all dialects of the Hamitic type.†

* See Bunsen's Christianity and Civilisation.

† See also The Mosaic Ethnology of Europe, p. 129.

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CHAPTER XXIII.

MAN AND WOMAN.

WHATEVER may be our notion as to the character of man's first language, and however we may endeavour to explain its origin and employment, there can be no doubt in any mind that articulate speech is the vehicle of human reason, in contradistinction to whatever may be the vocal medium of expressing impulse and sensation in brutal minds. And as man, if distinctly created, did not pass into the activities of breathing life inspired by Heaven, fresh from the moulding touch of the Divine hand, with the stamp of incompleteness in any of his faculties, the power of uttering thought in appropriate words must speedily have found occasion for its development and exercise by some process best adapted for the purpose, devised and put in force by Him who made man, with aspirations to hold communion not only with man but also with his Maker. There is really no conceivable mode of manifestation to man's mind but by embodiments that shall influence his senses. If we have abstract ideas, yet these could have been derived only as phenomena were calculated to excite those ideas in the mind as constituted thus to be

excited. Some sensible sign must indicate properties and conditions before we can possess metaphysical conceptions. We must perceive an object before we can conceive an idea. There is no teaching but by the senses, and man cannot apprehend anything concerning the Divine nature, but as it pleases God to reveal Himself in a human manner in accommodation to human nature, which is created to be the image and reflex of the Creator. If man, mentally and morally, is to endure as seeing Him who is invisible, except as humanly revealing Himself, the Deity, until so revealed, must remain an abstraction to our minds, inferred to be a person, because will and reason in man persist in saying I am; therefore, as I am a personal being, a personal Being must have originated me. But Christianity not only confirms the inference, but affirms the indwelling of the fulness of the Godhead bodily' in a man, Immanuel, so that the abstract conception of Divine Personality becomes a fact to the Christian believer who sees the Father in the Son revealing Himself in word and deed. There is therefore no outrage to reason in imagining any degree of anthropomorphism,' any degree of Divine accommodation to the faculties of human nature, by which man might feel and know by visible and audible evidence that God Himself was man's inspirer and instructor, in the conception and utterance of thought, in modulated sounds and syllables as the signs of ideas, objects, and emotions. But reason does not warrant the supposition that Omniscience placed two persons together in total ignorance of all things, as

associates for each other, to evolve a language for themselves by their mutual endeavours to become intelligent and communicative.

As a great thinker says, 'Who taught thee to speak?' By that question does he not imply that some one taught the first man to speak? He talks, indeed, of 'the day when two hairy-naked or fig-leaved human figures began, as uncomfortable dummies, anxious no longer to be dumb, but to impart themselves to one another; and endeavoured, with gaspings, gesturings, with unsyllabled cries, with painful pantomime and interjections in a very unsuccessful manner.' * But surely he is sneering at the imitation theory. No human figures ever held such foolish dumb-show with each other since the first pair, and if we think their lot was thus uncomfortable and unsuccessful, we must impiously imagine their Maker producing an absurdity never otherwise seen in this world.

No; the Divine method is to prepare one mind for another. And therefore when the first man was endowed with language, however taught, he was qualified to become the teacher of one who should be not only in the position of a companion, but as such grow into intimate endearment as the recipient of instruction from his loving heart. When man had language, he was not long without a being by his side akin in nature to himself, with whom to hold sweet fellowship, who should derive from his own accordant lips and speaking looks

* Carlyle's Past and Present, p. 175,