308 
Aryan speech, we may say with Prof. Muller, “We can under- 
stand the necessary breaking-up of one language into many ; 
and we perceive that no amount of variety in the material or 
the formal elements of speech is incompatible with the admis- 
sion of one common source. The science of language thus 
leads us up to that highest summit from whence we see into 
the very dawn of man ; s life on earth, and where the words 
which we have heard so often from the days of our childhood, 
— f And the whole earth was of one language and of one 
speech/ — assume a meaning more natural, more intelligible, 
more convincing, than they ever had before."”* As to religion, 
there is and has been but one true and divine religion ; at 
sundry times and in divers manners has God in time past 
spoken unto the fathers of the human race, but one and the 
same expanding scheme and purpose was culminated by the 
advent of His Son. Nor is this religion founded upon sacred 
books only, for it existed ages ere Genesis was penned; and 
the beliefs of those who have wandered from it, like the dialects 
of their speech, are but altered copies of a single original, 
changed by time, locality, climate, progress, discovery, con- 
quest, but above all by the influence of the baser side of 
humanity. But mark the vast importance of this fact. Just 
as the investigations of comparative philology bid fair in time 
to reproduce to our view the hidden source of language and 
its primeval phases, so comparative investigation into the 
variant religious beliefs of mankind promises to reproduce to 
us a primitive religion, and in so doing will undoubtedly con- 
tribute a weighty argument in favour of the truth of Chris- 
tianity. People may discuss for ever such a question as, Who 
wrote the Book of Genesis, and when ? without being able to 
convince each other ; but it would not be easy to disregard a 
wide argument based upon nature and confirmed by universal 
history. Let no one, therefore, disparage the importance of 
such inquiries, or think that old-fashioned dogmatising about 
the two Testaments is all that need now be done for the 
defence of religion. Prof. Miiller speaks of “ those who are 
for ever attacking the Bible with arrows that cannot reach it,” 
and of “those who defend it with weapons they know not how 
to wield.” Let us shun the second class even as we would the 
first. 
5. The Argument from General Consent. 
From mention of the foregoing unities we pass naturally to 
a brief consideration of the argument in favour of the existence 
* Lectures on the Science of Language, i. 447-8. 
