294 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



orthodox theory of language, strong and apparently firm, which 

 has lasted throughout Christendom for nearly two thousand 

 years. 



There had, indeed, come into human thought at the very earli- 

 est period some suggestions of the modern scientific view of phi- 

 lology. Lucretius had proposed a theory, inadequate indeed, but 

 still pointing very directly toward the truth, as follows : " Nature 

 impelled man to try the various sounds of the tongue, and so 

 struck out the names of things, much in the same way as the in- 

 ability to speak is seen in its turn to drive children to the use of 

 gestures." But, among the early fathers of the Church, the only 

 one who seems to have caught an echo of this truth was St. Greg- 

 ory of Nyssa ; as a rule, all the other great founders of Christian 

 theology, as far as they expressed themselves on the subject, took 

 the view that the original language spoken by the Almighty and 

 given by him to men was Hebrew, and that from this all other 

 languages were derived at the destruction of the Tower of Babel. 

 This doctrine was especially upheld by Origen, St. Jerome, and 

 St. Augustine. Origen taught that "the language given at the 

 first through Adam, the Hebrew, remained among that portion of 

 mankind which was assigned not to any angel, but continued the 

 portion of God himself." St. Augustine declared that, when the 

 other races were divided by their own peculiar languages, Heber's 

 family preserved that language which is not unreasonably be- 

 lieved to have been the common language of the race, and that on 

 this account it was henceforth called Hebrew. St. Jerome wrote, 

 " The whole of antiquity affirms that Hebrew, in which the Old 

 Testament is written, was the beginning of all human speech." 



Amid such great authorities as these even Gregory of Nyssa 

 struggled in vain. He seems to have taken the matter very 

 earnestly, and to have used not only argument but ridicule. He 

 insists that God does not speak Hebrew, and that the tongue 

 used by Moses was not even a pure dialect of one of the lan- 

 guages resulting from " the confusion." He makes man the in- 

 ventor of speech, and resorts to raillery : speaking against his 

 opponent Eunomius, he says that " passing in silence his base 

 and abject garrulity/' he will "note a few things which are 

 thrown into the midst of his useless or wordy discourse, where 

 he represents God teaching words and names to our first parents, 

 sitting before them like some pedagogue or grammar master." 

 But, naturally, the great authority of Origen, Jerome, and Augus- 

 tine prevailed ; the view suggested by Lucretius, and again by 

 St. Gregory of Nyssa, died out, and " always, everywhere, and 

 by all " in the Church the doctrine was received that the lan- 

 guage spoken by the Almighty was Hebrew ; that it was taught 

 by him to Adam, and that all other languages on the face of the 



