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loose mode of expression current in the place amongst the people. Mr. 
Brown has alluded to superhuman thoughts arising out of true religion, 
and all true religion involving superhuman thought ; therefore, as a con- 
sequence, superhuman language is required to set forth superhuman thought. 
Let us take an illustration from the difficulties our missionaries have to 
deal with. I refer to the difficulty experienced in translating the Chinese 
language by the Roman Catholic missionaries, the English Protestant 
missionaries, and the American Protestant missionaries. They all had 
to obtain a word to represent the Supreme Being, and they all took 
different words, one taking Tien tu, another Shangti, and another Shin, 
until they came among the rebels, when they found they used the word 
Shangti. It is easy to understand how every language may be thus 
influenced, so that after the fall of man and the degradation of his 
intellect, while he does not lose sight of the Supreme Being,— and I, for 
one, do not believe there has ever been any one in the world who did not 
believe in a Supreme Being, — it may be in a superstitious way, — but in 
some Supreme Being and a hereafter, — a religious effect is exercised on the 
conscience, and man is thus kept within bounds. As the nations fell 
into barbarism their language would be degraded and changed, and then 
the process of improvement alluded to by the lecturer would have found a 
place in any nation that advanced, and as it advanced, more particularly as 
it received new ideas and powers from revelation. I think it immensely 
important that we should keep before our minds that the statements of 
Scripture represent facts and realities. 
Mr. W. Griffith.— I am sure we are all greatly indebted to Mr. Brown 
for the pains he has taken in presenting us with so laborious a view of the 
theories entertained on this interesting subject. Of course, one of the first 
questions arising upon it is, What is language ? I have had the pleasure of 
listening very often to the eloquence of the Archbishop of York. He is a 
man of undoubted ability, but I must take exception to the accuracy of his 
definition that language is “ a mode of expressing our thoughts by means of 
motions of the organs of the body.” Language is the process of expressing the 
operations of the mind, but it does more than express those highly-developed 
mental operations called thoughts. It is perfectly correct, as Mr. Brown has 
told us, that the mind not only reasons and thinks, but there are certain innate 
ideas of right and wrong, of righteousness and sin, contained in the mind. 
Locke’s theory is that there are certain innate ideas employed in the mind 
from the first, and if the Archbishop of York had said language was an 
expression of our ideas rather than of our thoughts, he would have been 
nearer the truth ; but even then he would have been hardly correct, because 
language expresses feelings as well as ideas and thoughts. Passing to the 
more general question of what is the origin of language, — was it divinely 
given to man at the Creation, or has it been evolved in the process of time, — 
we come to a much more difficult subject. I must say that the reasons 
advanced by Mr. Howard for the conclusions he arrives at do not quite 
