164 LINGUISTICS IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC. 
has been used as a medium for the performance of the highest act of 
worship, the celebration of the holy mysteries. 
It may be predicated of all Melanesian languages that they are in 
themselves fit and proper instruments for use in God’s work. ‘The 
researches of scholars go to show that all languages are marvels of 
perfection, and the so-called jargons of savages are in their degree as 
perfect a creation as the language of the most highly civilized people. 
To question whether the Gospels can be translated, ¢. g., into one of the 
languages of Malaita because of the alleged absence from it of certain 
words and ideas which are the equivalent of or which correspond to 
certain words and ideas in the original Greek is, among other things, to 
forget the history of our own language. One has only to look at 
Coverdale’s Bible, to say nothing of the Douai Bible, to see the immense 
number of foreign words expressive of religious ideas that have been 
imported bodily into English from the classical languages. In some 
cases it may be that the idea required did not exist in English; in other 
cases, though the idea and word might be present, yet the foreign word 
eeeateds é. g.. conscience, where the English equivalent inwit survived 
until quite recently. Are we, then, to belittle the English language 
because either it lacked certain ideas or because it preferred to import 
bodily foreign words expressive of certain religious terms instead of 
using its own words or of making up words on existing lines? 
It can not be doubted that the actual foundation exists in every 
language whereon can be laid the superstructure of words necessary 
to convey the message of the Gospel. Nor can any existing language, 
Latin or English, be considered as the sacred language. ‘Lhe Blessed 
Saviour himself spoke in Aramaic, and yet the knowledge of His words 
and acts and the story of the carrying out of man’s salvation, both by 
His words and also by His life, have come to the world not through 
Aramaic, but through another language, Greek. To-day the Roman 
Catholic Church looks upon Latin as the sacred language, and the 
English Church for its part is apt to regard English as the one and only 
language, whereas the message of Pentecost is that no one language is 
above another in this respect, and that every man has a right to look 
on his own language as God-inspired and as existing for the purpose of 
conveying to him and his the divine message of salvation. 
To doubt that the languages of so-called savages contain sufficient 
words and ideas to use in promulgating the Christian religion is surely 
tantamount to denying that man was made originally in the image of 
God and was intended to seek God if haply he might feel after Him and 
find Him. 
Wherever translations of the Bible, etc., have been made in Mela- 
nesia it has always been found that it was possible to provide from the 
native tongue words and terms corresponding to the root ideas of the 
