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their methods of reasoning, the terms they employed were peculiarly un-Jewish and un-Christian. Their intellectual material, and their mode of working it up, was Gentile. No doubt they received something from Christianity; no doubt Christianity affected them morally and spiritually. But in the popular sense of the word, they did a great deal more for Christianity than Christianity did for them, for they made of it a philosophy, and exalted it to the throne of that imperial thought which for thousands of years has ruled the mind of man.

If, then, we would find the religion of Jesus, we must not seek it in what is called Christianity; we must not look for it among the Fathers of the church. We must abandon our hopeless picking and choosing among the dogmas of the various sects. Nothing will be gained by the old method of controversy, which at the best but analyzes, compares and weighs against one another credences none of which, perhaps, contain the faith of Christ. We must set aside as irrelevant at least, and as based on false assumptions, every received statement respecting the person and the teaching of Jesus, and must go back to the original sources of information to study the problem afresh, by the aid of a better philosophy and a finer criticism.

We have negative interpretations of Christianity enough. We have been told again and again what Christianity is not. The Lutheran says it is not Romanism; the Calvinist says it is not Lutheranism; the Socinian says it is not either of these; the Presbyterian says it is not Episcopacy; the Congregationalist says it is not Presbyterianism. Each denomination defines itself against some other, and is more concerned to deny its antagonist error, than to affirm its own truth. Every sect is a heresy, borrowing something from the sect it has abandoned, but emphasizing what it has rejected, not what it has retained. It is known by the doctrines it has abjured. It is created and supported by controversy. If it ceases from disputation, it ceases from being. It endures so long as it is aggressive; for its life is an excited fever of hot strife against what it does not believe, rather than a natural vitality of faith in what it does. The Catholic church snatched its doctrine from the philosophers, whom it straightway denounced as heretics, covering up its act of plunder by casting a suspicion of dishonesty upon the plundered, and securing its prize, not by proving its own right of possession, but by decrying theirs and

refusing even to acknowledge an identity of goods; doing scarcely anything else for five centuries but affirm that Christianity was not this, and was not that. The Protestant church took what it wanted from the Roman, then turned its back, repudiated its benefactor, and once more spoiled the Egyptians.. The divers Protestant sects followed these distinguished examples, until at length each had so much to do, in declaring what was not its own, that no time was left to declare what was.

The Roman Catholic church, though collecting its doctrines from all ages, and from all parts of the world, did nevertheless claim to receive the spirit of truth from Christ himself; not through the medium of any written scripture, or any formal teaching, but by way of tradition, private and exclusive, and by the influx of his ever-present light. The Protestant churches, though denying that any such channel of communication existed, have not succeeded in opening another, and have occupied themselves wholly with the task of discussing, analyzing, and resolving into its parts that heterogeneous body of dogmas which was assumed to be true in the main, under the name of Christianity.

The truth of these dogmas is now questioned by multitudes. A keen and wide-spread skepticism scrutinizes the received belief of Christendom in all its forms. But the name of Jesus is still revered, and the faith of Jesus is still appealed to, not as a system of dogmatic theology, but as the inspiring principle of divine and human enterprises. It remains to be seen whether this name can be applied to a person, and whether the faith of this person can be discovered: whether we are still to receive influence from a living soul of matchless grandeur and beauty in the past, or whether we must grant that the blessed being whom Christendom has worshipped, is but a heavenly vision, a phantom shape which the spirit of man has projected upon the dark background of history, to represent its ideal of truth, purity, trust and love,-a creature of the imagination, enduring through its loveliness, and reflecting eternal power and glory upon the divine reason that called it into being.

THE WORD.

[First Paper. 1

NOTHING can be regarded as more significant than the new interest which, in the present day, surrounds the study of words. If old Verstegan and Pegge and Horne Tooke could now wake up, they would find themselves famous! Every man of science or philosophy now regards his statement as incomplete without a careful treatment of the bearings of the word. The Humboldts, F. Schlegel, and all the students of races, have made it one cornerstone of their respective edifices. Men of talent, such as Mr. Trench, have arisen in every country to revive for young students old and scattered etymologies; and in America we have at last a young thinker and enthusiast, who has the brave tone of a philological explorer. Our allusion is, of course, to Mr. Swinton, the author of the modestly-named work, Rambles among Words, whose gold, although it is not thoroughly washed-bearing also marks of hasty mining-is yet of a purer quality than that which any other venturer has brought back from this El Dorado.

A theorem of the word has arisen out of these accumulated histories and analyses, and a Theory of the Word is now the desideratum. There may be found in one or two writers generalizations which will furnish the naturalist of words, when he shall come, the bone from which the whole structure shall be deduced and described as when Emerson calls words "fossil poetry;" but as yet none of them have furnished a Philosophy of the Word. It is as a contribution in this special direction that this paper is intended.

The first hint of the vast range of this study meets us in the word WORD itself. It is through the Latin verbum, from vir, the word for MAN. We learn from the inscription over the temple we are entering, that language is a second and higher body which the soul puts forth for expression and self-realization. The word is the manifestation of man, and the true man was well called THE WORD. This explains well enough, also, that the newly-awakened interest in the investigation of words is the result of an age of consciousness. In no other way have we been able to draw so near to ourselves. I find that I was so altered in that dusky, oriental complexion, or that Greek and Roman costume-I was

so theatrical in France and savage among the aborigines, that I did not recognize myself; but having translated myself, ancient Judea and Greece, and other somewhat dim recollections of my past life, are made quite clear. Men have recorded of some barbarous nations that they have no history of their own origin and life; but this assertion only attests the infancy of our philological studies. Where there is speech, there is history; the record is as safely kept in the gibberish of Choctaw and Fejee as is the age of a tree in its rings. Our exacter histories are to theirs as a chronometer to the dial of Linnæus, which denoted the advancing and receding day by the opening and closing of flowers. In the day of life of these unconscious children, each high deed, or larger emotion, or more sacred conviction, when its moment came, flowered to its virtue in the heart and its word upon the tongue. Unlock the word, and you may not indeed find chronology, but you will inevitably find history.

There are, then, no “dead languages." As truly as the blood of every people which has existed still survives on earth, so truly do those noble thoughts, which Milton calls "the life-blood of noble spirits," live and throb in their words, and the richest bloom of intellectual men comes of a transfusion from these full arteries. Thus, though Horne Tooke may call his investigations of quaint derivations Diversions, the study of language itself goes deeper than letters and speculation, and demands something beyond literary acumen. Assyria, Greece, Rome, are dead; but the God to whose thought Assyria, Greece, and Rome were but a pictured alphabet, is not dead! To the mind which can spell out that thought from the languages to which it was confided, each true spelling is a gospel or God's-spell. Thus we bear with us into our studies the spirit of that old Greek, who, having visited with his friends the temples of the gods, came with them to his own lowly door, and said, "Let us enter, for here also are the gods." Not alone in the seemingly grander temples of science or theology are treasured the wondrous revelations of God to man, but the every-day speech of men, obscure or eminent, is the full garner of the joy that has descended, as the golden apricot is garner of the sunbeams and dew-drops and wind and rain that have descended upon it.

"One accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world hath never lost."

One of the oldest traditions concerning the origin of language is that verse of Genesis (ii. 19), where, in the figurative style of the Hebrew, we are told that Jehovah brought all his creatures to Adam, "and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." This is no doubt true; but if the historian had been an ordinary profane Anglo-Saxon, he would have transmitted the fact far less grandly, and made the matterof-fact statement that God brought all creatures to Adam to be named, by giving him eyes to see them, and ears to hear them; and that, by the coöperation of personal necessities, each thing signed its own distinctive autograph on his mind. That was its name or noun. This is certified by our knowledge that children first learn to utter names, and that the vocabularies of savage tribes consist mostly of names-i. e., nouns. Sensation, which is first, gives nouns in imitative accordance with the most salient impression of the object. Action, which succeeds sensation, and marks the entrance of will, gives verbs which are nouns in motion or action. Reflection gives adjectives and adverbs, which first assert that the man which distinguishes and chooses is born. The noun, verb, and adverb are distinct periods in the geology of words, and must have demanded for their formation ages proportionate to those which were occupied by primary, secondary, and tertiary in the earth.

Here rises the question, by its ability to answer which, of course, any theory of language must be judged: How came these words to express their special objects or emotions? The doctrine that words were given arbitrarily by any one man, or diffused by any generation of men and transmitted by their children, does not pretend to rest on a philosophical basis, and therefore may be left to sink or swim with the credit of the traditions which are supposed to establish it. The idea of a supernatural gift of words from the Creator must be excluded, by the frequent imperfections of words in expressing the true nature of their objects. For example, the word used for the heavens in the Old Testament, correctly rendered firmament, represents the belief of the writer that the sky was a solid arch: a conclusion sufficiently attested by other portions of the book in which it is declared that this wall separated the waters above from the waters beneath, and in which, when rain is spoken of, it is said that the windows of this firmament are opened. Of course, a miraculously-given language would be

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