298 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



large faction in the Church for advanced views, refers to Hebrew 

 as " spoken by the month of God." 



This idea was popularized by the 1508 edition of the Margarita 

 Philosophica, published at Strasburg. That work in its suc- 

 cessive editions a mirror of human knowledge at the close of the 

 middle ages and the opening of modern times contains a curi- 

 ous introduction to the study of Hebrew. In this it is declared 

 that Hebrew was the original speech, "used between God and 

 man and between men and angels." Its full-page frontispiece 

 represents Moses receiving from God the tables of stone written 

 in Hebrew; and, as a conclusive argument, it reminds us that 

 Christ himself, by choosing a Hebrew maid for his mother, made 

 that his mother-tongue. 



It must be noted here, however, that Luther, in one of those 

 outbursts of strong sense which so often appear in his career, 

 enforced the explanation that the words " God said " had nothing 

 to do with the voice or articulation of human language. Still, 

 he evidently yielded to the general view. In the Eoman Church 

 at the same period we have a typical example of the theologic 

 method in the statement by Luther's great opponent, Cajetan, 

 that the three languages of the inscription on the cross of Calvary 

 "were the representatives of all languages," and he gives as the 

 reason for this the fact that " the number three denotes perfec- 

 tion." 



In 1538 Postillus made a very important endeavor at a com- 

 parative study of languages, but with the orthodox assumption 

 that all were derived from one source, namely, the Hebrew. 

 Naturally, Comparative Philology blundered and stumbled on in 

 this path with endless absurdities. The most amazing efforts 

 were made to trace back everything to the sacred language. 

 English and Latin dictionaries appeared, in which every word 

 was traced back to a supposed Hebrew root. No supposition was 

 too absurd in this attempt to square Science with Scripture. It 

 was declared that, as Hebrew is written from right to left, it 

 might be read either way, in order to produce a satisfactory ety- 

 mology. The whole effort in all this sacred scholarship was, not 

 to find what the truth is ; not to see how the various languages 

 are to be classified, or from what source they are really derived, 

 but to demonstrate what was supposed necessary to" maintain the 

 truth of Scripture, namely, that all languages are derived from 

 the Hebrew. 



This stumbling and blundering, under the sway of this ortho- 

 dox necessity, is seen among the foremost scholars throughout 

 Europe. About the middle of the sixteenth century the great 

 Swiss scholar, Conrad Gesner, beginning his Mithridates, says, 

 " While of all languages Hebrew is the first and oldest, of all is 



