1898-99. | LANGUAGE AND RELIGION. 279 
there was bestowed upon him the power of naming, for he was more 
than a speaking machine, uttering words as a parrot. God treated him 
as an intelligent being, and endowed him with the faculty of language, 
and by His power aroused the faculty to act in accordance with the 
divine laws. The greatness of the task set before Adam in naming the 
animals may be seen in the fact that he had to give original names 
whilst the method usually followed by colonists and settlers is to give 
secondary names, such as they select from their previous knowledge- 
The work of the first man as the primitive language-former was sufficient 
to tax his highest powers, and awaken and keep active his sense of as- 
sociation between the external world and articulate sounds. The Jesuit 
Larramendi makes Basque the common source of all languages, the 
Abbe d’Iharce de Bidassouet says that Escuara was the language in 
which the Eternal Father conversed with the first of the Jews, an 
eminent Celtic scholar suggests that ‘Celtic was the primitive tongue, 
whilst others have shown the affinities of the Celtic with Hebrew, 
making the former the older language, and some of the American 
Indian tribes speak of their language as the perfect language. The 
first language, however, is unknown to us, and will very likely remain 
a mystery. 
The origin of all languages from a complete and perfect primeval lan- 
guage having a fully developed grammar and dictionary as the gift of 
God, accords with the idea that language is too great an achievement 
‘for the human mind, but there is no necessity for assuming the existence 
of such a primitive tongue, man being endowed with the faculty of speech 
and a creative faculty of language-making from germs or roots, so that 
in accordance with the laws of language, he could develop a flexible 
form of speech, or by neglecting the laws, beget decay, or arrest a lan- 
guage in one of its stages. The origin of stocks of languages 
although a much disputed question seems to arise from the tribe 
or people which first spoke the mother-tongue of each stock, having 
a common origin, and this tribe must have been isolated for a long 
time from other tribes sufficient to form a distinct grammar and 
vocabulary, and a peculiar mental and moral character. A language 
may become the mother of other languages, and these descendants 
preserve something in common by which philologists are able to trace 
them to the mother-tongue. 
Languages are born, grow, decay and die like individuals, institutions, 
nations, races and religions. Just as the Hebrew has passed through 
three distinct phases, other tongues have developed and finally reached 
