207 
and add to his knowledge. So, while there may have been what 
may be called the infancy of civilisation, followed by its child- 
hood and youth, leading up to its manhood; it was, however, 
an infancy of human nature, whose origin was from God and 
not from the unconscious efforts of unreasoning brutes. If 
otherwise, how did man become possessed of the knowledge 
of the art of producing fire? Howcame human language ? 
When speaking on the subject of human language, Professor 
Max Miiller well says, ‘“ Language still bears the impress of 
the. earliest thoughts of man, obliterated, it may be, buried 
under new thoughts, yet here and there still recoverable in 
their original outline. .... I may here express my conviction 
that the science of language will yet enable us to withstand 
the extreme theories of the evolutionist, and draw a hard-and- 
fast line between spirit and matter, between man and brute.” 
—WSelected Essays, vol... p. 3. 
Again, the Professor, in his Science of Language, pp. 13, 14, 
makes the following important statement :—‘“‘ Now, however 
much the frontiers of the animal kingdom have been pushed 
forward, so that at one time the line of demarcation between 
animal and man seemed to depend on a mere fold in the 
brain, there is one barrier which no one has yet ventured to 
touch,—the barrier of language. Even those philosophers 
with whom penser c’est sentir, who reduce all thoughts to 
feelings, and maintain that we share the faculties which are the 
productive causes of thought in common with beasts, are 
bound to confess that as yet no race of animals has produced 
a language.”” Where, then, the difference between brute and 
man? What is it, then, that man can do, and of which we 
find no sign or rudiments in the whole brute world ? I answer 
without hesitation: the one great barrier between man and 
brute is Language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever 
uttered a word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will 
dare to cross it. This is our matter-of-fact answer to those 
who think they discover the rudiments at least of all human 
faculties in apes, and who would fain keep open the possi- 
bility that man is only a more favoured beast, the triumphant 
conqueror in the primeval struggle for life. Language is 
something more palpable than a fold of the brain or an angle 
of the skull. It admits of no cavilling, and no process of 
natural selection will ever distil significant words out of the 
notes of birds or the cries of beasts.””—WScience of Language, 
p. 306. 
In conclusion, let us ask,—If man be a mere improved 
ape, whence did he derive his knowledge of religion? It 
matters not how far we go back in the history of man, the 
