

REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 257 



which mankind are at that time engrossed, should 

 fall asleep, as it were, and fade from the memory. 

 It would be utterly lost, if the propositions or for- 

 mulas, the results of the previous experience, did not 

 remain, and continue to be repeated and believed 

 in, as forms of words it may be, but of words that 

 once really conveyed, and are still supposed to convey, 

 a meaning: which meaning, though suspended, may 

 be historically traced, and when suggested, is recog- 

 nised by minds of the necessary endowments as being 

 still matter of fact,, or truth. While the formulae 

 remain, the meaning may at any time revive; and as 

 on the one hand the formulas progressively lose the 

 meaning they were intended to convey, so on the 

 other, when this forgetfulness has reached its height 

 and begun to produce consequences of obvious evil, 

 minds arise which from the contemplation of the 

 formulae rediscover the whole truth, and announce it 

 again to mankind, not as a discovery, but as the 

 meaning of that which they have long been taught, 

 and still profess to believe. 



Thus there is a perpetual oscillation in spiritual 

 truths, and in spiritual doctrines of any significance, 

 even when not truths. Their meaning is almost 

 always in a process either of being lost or of being 

 recovered ; a remark upon which all history is a com- 

 ment. Whoever has attended to the history of the 

 more serious convictions of mankind of the opinions 

 by which the general conduct of their lives is, or as 

 they conceive ought to be, more especially regulated 

 is aware that while recognising verbally the very same 

 doctrines, they attach to them at different periods a 

 greater or a less quantity, and even a different kind, 

 of meaning. The words in their original acceptation 

 connoted, and the propositions expressed, a coinplica- 



VOL. II. S 



