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in Nature itself, capable of reduction into a vast unity ; for, 
although both sounds, delineations, and ideas, like chessmen, 
present combinations practically innumerable, still, like chess- 
men, they are susceptible of classification, analysis, and co- 
alescence in a single system. Again, language, in its totality, 
is not borrowed from without, but first welling up within the 
soul by virtue of a mysterious power inherent in the human 
individual, and then, assisted in its manifestation by the external 
world, it finally overflows the Ego, and produces an harmonious 
link between two or more beings ; and, similarly, religion 
originates within to work outwardly, and, in its origin, is utterly 
independent of the material and the visible, however greatly 
these may assist or entangle its subsequent career. Language 
has become, in course of time, and with the increase and dis- 
persion of population, almost infinitely varied, complicated, 
in many cases exhausted, degraded, and defiled ; or, again, 
purified, elevated, vastly extended, made delicately accurate 
and harmonious ; and, as its history continues, the possibility of 
its union or re-union in a single tongue becomes distinct : and 
religion has undergone an exactly corresponding destiny, and as 
no one ever urges the errors, degradations, or excesses which 
have arisen in connexion with language against its use, and its 
existence as a most practical, true, and important institution ; 
so, equally, such arguments when advanced against religion, are 
not merely unjust but ridiculous, and if it be objected to this 
parallel that men cannot do without language, I have yet to 
learn that they can do without religion, although, of course, 
here and there an unreligious individual may be found, the 
deaf-and-blind-mute of a religious world. As even in our 
present civilisation the number of the ideas and of the words 
used by ordinary persons is extremely limited, so, it is evident 
that language in its earliest phases, owing to the simplicity of 
life, paucity of experience, and smallness of numbers of its 
employers, must have been also extremely simple, without 
almost the whole of those elaborations which, to later ages, 
become grammar with its alphabets and parts of speech. For 
the same reasons we might a priori suppose, and investigation 
confirms the fact, that religion in its earliest phases would 
exhibit a corresponding simplicity, a healthy infancy, — im- 
mature, indeed, when compared with subsequent attainment, — 
but yet, at the same time, free from those infirmities which beset 
age, unendowed with a formulated creed, canons, or articles, the 
grammar of belief, but based upon truth and giving light 
sufficient for the time. Again, language, like religion, is 
founded upon the unseen and immaterial, for it arises from 
the effort to telegraph thought to the consciousness of some 
