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Leyden. In his inaugural oration on The Dignity and Utility 

 of the Hebrew Tongue, he puts himself emphatically on record 

 in favor of the divine origin and miraculous purity of that lan- 

 guage. " Who," he says, " can call in question the fact that the 

 Hebrew idiom is coeval with the world itself, save such as seek to 

 win vainglory for their own sophistry by obscuring the truth ? " 



Two years after Willett, in England, comes the famous Dr. 

 Lightfoot, one of the renowned scholars of his time in Hebrew, 

 Greek, and Latin ; but all his scholarship was bent to suit theo- 

 logical requirements. In his " Erubhin," or Miscellanies, pub- 

 lished in 1629, he goes to the full length of the sacred theory, 

 though we begin to see a curious endeavor to get over some lin- 

 guistic difficulties. One passage will serve to show both the ro- 

 bustness of his faith and the acuteness of his reasoning, in view 

 of the difficulties which scholars now began to find in the sacred 

 theory : " Other commendations this tongue (Hebrew) needeth 

 none than what it hath of itself ; namely, for sanctity it was the 

 tongue of God; and for antiquity it was the tongue of Adam. 

 God the first founder, and Adam the first speaker of it ... It 

 began with the world and the Church, and continued and in- 

 creased in glory till the captivity in Babylon . . . As the man in 

 Seneca, that through sickness lost his memory and forgot his own 

 name, so the Jews, for their sins, lost their language and forgot 

 their own tongue . . . Before the confusion of tongues all the 

 world spoke their tongue and no other ; but, since the confusion 

 of the Jews, they speak the language of all the world and not 

 their own." 



But just at the middle of the century (1657) came in England 

 a champion of the sacred theory more important than any of 

 these Brian Walton, Bishop of Chester. His Polyglot Bible, 

 with its prolegomena, dominated English scriptural criticism 

 throughout the remainder of the century. He begins his great 

 work by proving at length the divine origin of Hebrew, and the 

 derivation from it of all other forms of speech. He declares it 

 " probable that the first parent of mankind was the inventor of 

 letters." His chapters on this subject are full of interesting de- 

 tails. He says that the Welshman, Davis, had already tried to 

 prove the Welsh the primitive speech ; Wormius, the Danish ; 

 Mitilerius, the German ; but the bishop stands firmly by the sacred 

 theory, declaring that " even in the New World are found traces 

 of the Hebrew tongue, namely, in New England and in New Bel- 

 gium, where the word Aguarda signifies earth, and the name 

 Joseph is found among the Hurons." As we have seen, Bishop 

 Walton had been forced to give up the inspiration of the rabbini- 

 cal punctuation, but he seems to have fallen back with all the 

 more tenacity on what remained of the great sacred theory of 



