138 UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES. 



tion, for originating in Rome, a flood of learned men 

 swept over the continent, whose common language was 

 classical Latin, and the emotion caused by that rush has 

 not yet subsided to the present day. For several cen- 

 turies the lectures at the universities were delivered in 

 Latin. They were bold, audacious steps when Chr. 

 Thomasius, in 1687, delivered the first lecture in German 

 at the University of Leipzig, when Chr. Wolf, in Halle, 

 wrote his philosophical works in the same language, and 

 when, after all, a whole university, Gottingen in Ger- 

 many, after long and fierce struggles, resolved that all 

 professors should deliver their lectures in German. Still 

 to-day we can find many colleges and universities on the 

 European continent where Latin is the official language 

 of intercourse between officers and professors of the 

 school and the students, and the lectures of most theo- 

 logical seminaries are still delivered in Latin. 



Another lasting sign of the powerful influence of Latin 

 is found in the circumstance that the prayer-books of the 

 Roman Catholic Church are still in that language. 

 While evangelical churches claim that prayers, hymns 

 and church songs must be written in the languages 

 understood by the communities in order to be sung 

 cheerfully and with enthusiasm, the Roman Catholic 

 Church points out that wherever a member of the 

 church may go, either in his own or to a far distant 

 country, he will always find the same Latin liturgy of the 

 service, and the same hymns, facts which must bind the 

 members of the church far closer together, however widely 

 they may be scattered. 



Meanwhile the Modern Spirit moved and developed 

 powerfully, and even the universal Latin language was 

 not sufficient to express those world-moving new ideas, 

 those powerful new thoughts, those new facts which 

 marked so decisively the beginning of a new era. The 

 first European language which gained prominence by 



