NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 44.1 



At last (Lucretius says and Creech) 

 They set their wits to work on speech : 

 And that their thoughts might all have marks 

 To make them known, these learned clerks 

 Left off the trade of cracking crowns, 

 And manufactured verbs and nouns." 



But a far more powerful theologian entered the field in Eng- 

 land to save the sacred theory of language Dr. Adam Clarke. 

 He was no less severe against Philology than against Geology. In 

 1804, as President of the Manchester Philological Society, he deliv- 

 ered an address in which he declared that, while men of all sects 

 were eligible to membership, " he who rejects the establishment of 

 what we believe to be a divine revelation, he who would disturb 

 the peace of the quiet, and by doubtful disputations unhinge the 

 minds of the simple and unreflecting, and endeavor to turn the 

 unwary out of the way of peace and rational subordination, can 

 have no seat among the members of this institution." The first 

 sentence in this declaration gives food for reflection, for it is the 

 same confusion of two ideas which has been at the root of so 

 much interference of theology with science for the last two thou- 

 sand years. Adam Clarke speaks of those " who reject the estab- 

 lishment of what ' we believe ' to be a divine revelation." Thus 

 comes in that customary begging of the question the substitu- 

 tion as the real significance of Scripture of " what we believe " for 

 what is. 



The intended result, too, of this ecclesiastical sentence was 

 simple enough. It was, that great men, like Sir William Jones, 

 Colebrooke, and their compeers, must not be heard in the Man- 

 chester Philological Society in discussion with Dr. Adam Clarke 

 on questions regarding Sanskrit and other matters upon which they 

 knew all that was then known, and Dr. Clarke knew nothing. 



But even Clarke was forced to yield to the scientific current. 

 Thirty years later, in his Commentary on the Old Testament, he 

 pitched the claims of the sacred theory on a much lower key. He 

 says : " Mankind was of one language, in all likelihood the He- 

 brew. . . . The proper names and other significations given in the 

 Scripture seem incontestable evidence that the Hebrew language 

 was the original language of the earth, the language in which 

 God spoke to man, and in which he gave the revelation of his will 

 to Moses and the prophets." Here are signs that this great cham- 

 pion is growing weaker in the faith ; in the citations made it will 

 be observed he no longer says " is," but " seems " ; and finally we 

 have him saying, " What the first language was is almost useless 

 to inquire, as it is impossible to arrive at any satisfactory infor- 

 mation on this point." 



In France, during the first half of the nineteenth century, yet 



