Back of our coarser and more block-like English, we transfer ourselves to the French, with its subtler refinements-with touches of its hair-like pencillings upon the shades of thought; or with its buoyant swell and give to all emotion, as elasticities of wave to sinuosities of shore. And back of this again: in dream-like thrall to more melodious cadences of the Italian tones-" accents whose law was beauty, and whose breath enrapturing music." And back of these-back of their mother-Latin--to the infinite versatility and grandeur and depth and comprehensiveness of the Greek. Greek! in itself a universe prepared for teeming and for populating thought. Greek! with its infinite and wondrous subtleties of shade in mood and tense, its play of graceful and innumerable particles, and cadences like chimes of air-flung and metallic bells. And, back, still back-and, the farther, the more complicated and abstruse-the more exacting in its constructions-the more precise in its articulations-the more attenuated in its case and tense endings, is our human speech-the more Divine a vehicle of wide enfranchised thought. The Sanscrit is not any longer like pulley-blocks roped together, nor like corals threaded on a string. Smooth and pellucid in its flow, it is as liquid sunlight dropping in echoes of a rhythmic and remote cascade, as from the ledges of an upper and angelic heaven.

Language, then, the higher we trace it, is not found to be a bungling and mechanical attempt at understanding. It is more and more the throb of holy heart to heartthe flash of heavenly thought rekindling thought, without the chasmed break, without the filmy veil; and all our dying tongues, down to the latest, are but fainter echoes -fragments of that earlier and loftier speech, in which the angels spoke to man--Adam to God, and God to Adam. When we have reached the beginning, we have in possession the language of God; the words and the

GRAMMAR which God gave in Eden-which man has corrupted, confounded, lost away in dialectic dislocations since the fall.

The Hebrew, like a prism shattered into various lights at Babel, is the matrix of all other roots and forms.

1. Because in it, as in no other, names are Divinely expressive. Originally, names are characters in photograph. They are, or they should be, like labels on phials, which describe the contents. Names at the first were manifestations of men and of things. They are so in Hebrew. Adam means "Earthy," Seth "Substituted," Noah "The Consoler," Abraham "The Father of Multitudes," Jacob Supplanter," Moses "Delivered,"

"Drawn out."

2. The Hebrew is original, because in it, as in no other, derivatives are built upon their roots, so that one can look through the derivative straight to the root, or back, so to say, through the slides of the telescope to the first. slide the root notion ruling unswervingly everywhere. Take as an example, Adam-earthy, because made from the earth-Isha, "woman," because made from Ish, man. In other languages the continuity is often broken. In Greek, Anthropos, "man," has no relation to Ge, the earth. In Latin, mulier, or femina, "woman," has no relation to homo.

3. The Hebrew form is antecedent to all similar forms in all other languages. Its root stands first. This is splendidly argued by Scaliger in opposition to the Maronites, who claimed a greater antiquity for the Syriac. What is the Hebrew for "king," says Scaliger,-" MELEKAH." What is the Hebrew ?" MELEK." Which has the root, and which is the shorter? That settles it.

4. Because the language employed by Adam in naming the animals was Hebrew, and that language was not

invented by him upon the occasion, but had been taught him by God.

One thing: Because the names given to the animals imply a knowledge of their attributes and characteristics. Another thing: God had already been talking to Adam, and in the same language.

Again: It seems that the animals were brought to Adam as object-lessons, to see what he would call them— i. e., God wished to see how accurately Adam would fit the name taught to the thing.

5. Because language is called in Scripture, not only "Throat" and "Lip," but especially "Tongue," and it is said that God teaches man this: "The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned" (Isa. 1. 4). "The preparations of the heart," not only, but "the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord."

6. Because the whole earth was once of one tongue and one speech, and that speech by common consent of all Jewish and Gentile Traditions, the Lingua Sancta, the Holy, or the Hebrew Tongue. So says Ephodeus; so Jonathan the Paraphrast. With this agree the Kabbalists, the Jerusalem Talmud, the Book of Cosri, R. Ben Jarchi, R. Ben Ezra, R. Levi ben Gerson-as well as Jerome, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine.*

7. Because God himself spoke before Adam was created, and spoke in Hebrew, calling "Light,” Day; "Darkness," Night; "Firmament," Heaven;

T:

"Dry land," Earth, etc.

Hebrew was the first language, and therefore the most perfect language; for "that which is perfect," says Aristotle, "requires a perfect expression"; and Adam, being made very good, must have had a language very, i. e.

*See Buxtorf, "De Antiquitate Ling. Heb."

perfectly good; besides, a language which God speaks, must be like God.

And one is tempted to believe agreeably with the ascending and unswerving trend of this conviction-that deep the die of inspiration strikes into the very structure of those languages which an Infinite Wisdom has deigned to employ as its mouthpiece.

Let us not tarry here upon mysteries, like that of the Incarnation, found by the Kabbalists in the Divine Tetragrammaton, in the very form of the word Jehovah itself, but take the verb, the life of every language. In the Hebrew the conjugation is from the third person down. It begins with "He" as the actor-i. e., with God first. It thus subverts the carnal languages of men and turns them upside down.

Language, in its decadence, marking the steps of our apostasy from God, begins with us here in the Occident, the sunset-"I," "Thou," "He,"-makes man the greatest and God least and last. The Hebrew, born when morning stars rejoiced, reverses this-confutes the spirit as the speech of carnal man and conjugates its verb Divinely down from God.

Another feature stamped upon the very structure of the tongues of inspiration, which, taxing your indulgence here, I venture to suggest, is that they not obscurely hint, before one word is spoken, all the redemptive scheme of God. Presenting the V of our apostasy and our recov ery-down from the Third Person, God, to the lost person, I, in the Hebrew; then from the lost person, "I," up again to the Third Person, God, in the Greek,-they further and even more strikingly exhibit man's aphelion and his counter perihelion in the directions which they take. Hebrew, which teaches the fall and departure from God, is written from the "right hand where God works" toward the left-from the sheep to the goats; while

Greek, which tells us of return and recovery, is written the other way-from the left to the right-from the goats to the sheep-from the "wilderness" to the "fold "—in God's thought of it backward.

Thus, stamped upon the gravements of its very casket -upon the structure of the tongues in which it speaks, we read conspicuous, self-evident, the truth, that while Philosophy, the science of man, moves forward, Theology, the science of God, moves backward-" Philosophia quotidie pro-gressu, Theologia nisi re-gressu non crescit."

Backward, backward, backward, the whole Volume moves us-not only nineteen centuries behind the present moment; but back of time itself and every moment into the light of all eternities-to speak the proclamation of a Gospel as antique and as unchangeable as are the determinate counsel and the foreknowledge of God-for “Of Him and through Him and to Him, are all things-to whom be the glory, forever. Amen!"

Brethren the danger of our present day-the "downgrade," as it has been called, of doctrine, of conviction, of the moral sentiment-a decline more constantly patent, as it is more blatantly proclaimed, does it not find its first step in our lost hold upon the very inspiration of the Word of God?

Does not a fresh conviction here, lie at the root of every remedy which we desire, as its sad lack lies at the root of every ruin we deplore?

Brethren: a fresh conviction-only that-of the very Inspiration of the Word of God-spreading itself abroad in the minds of our earnest American people, would wake -from Maine to Arizona, and from Florida to Idaho-the wave of a revival such as this continent has never known.

Key up! then let us key up our "Credo" in the absoluteness of the word which God has spoken. Bind