NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 303 



all tlie rest ; that this primitive language still exists in its pris- 

 tine purity ; that this language is the Hebrew. The second book 

 is devoted to proving that the Hebrew letters were divinely 

 received, have been preserved intact, and are the source of all 

 other alphabets. But in the third book he feels obliged to 

 declare, in the face of the contrary dogma held, as he says, by 

 " not a few most eminent men piously solicitous for the authority 

 of the sacred text/' that the Hebrew punctuation was, after all, 

 not of divine inspiration, but a late invention of the rabbis. 



France, also, was held to all appearance in complete subjection 

 to the orthodox idea up to the end of the century. In 1697 

 appeared at Paris perhaps the most learned of all the books 

 written to prove Hebrew the original tongue and source of all 

 others. The Gallican Church was then at the height of its power. 

 Bossuet as bishop, as thinker, and as an adviser of Louis XIV, 

 had crushed all opposition to orthodoxy. The Edict of Nantes 

 had been revoked ; and the Huguenots, so far as they could escape, 

 were scattered throughout the world, destined to repay France 

 with interest a thousand-fold during the next two centuries. The 

 bones of the Jansenists were dug up and scattered at Port Royal. 

 Louis XIV stood guard over the piety of his people. It was in 

 the midst of this series of triumphs that Father Louis Thomassin, 

 Priest .of the Oratory, issued his Universal Hebrew Glossary. 

 In this, to use his own language, " the divinity, antiquity, and 

 perpetuity of the Hebrew tongue, with its letters, accents, and 

 ether characters," are established forever and beyond all cavil, 

 by proofs drawn from all peoples, kindred, and nations under the 

 sun. This superb, thousand-columned folio was issued from the 

 royal press, and is one of the most imposing monuments of human 

 piety and folly ; taking rank with the great treatises of Fromun- 

 dus against Galileo, of Quaresmius on Lot's Wife, and of Glad- 

 stone on Genesis and Geology. 



The great theologic - philologic chorus was steadily main- 

 tained, and, as in an antiphonal chant, its doctrines were echoed 

 from land to land. From America there came the earnest words 

 of noble John Eliot, praising Hebrew as the most fit to be made a 

 universal language, and declaring it the tongue " which it pleased 

 our Lord Jesus to make use of when he spake from heaven unto 

 Paul." At the close of the seventeenth century comes, as it were, 

 a strong antiphonal answer in this chorus from England. Meric 

 Casaubon, the learned Prebendary of Canterbury, thus declares : 

 " One language, the Hebrew, I hold to be simply and absolutely 

 the source of all." And, to make the chorus perfect, there came 

 into it, in complete unison, the voice of Bentley the greatest 

 scholar of the old sort whom England has ever produced. He 

 was indeed one of the most learned and acute critics of any age, 



