with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment,'

Men sometimes complain of the number of new theological terms which the great controversies in which the Church from time to time has been engaged, have left behind them. But this could not have been otherwise, unless the gains through those controversies made, were presently to be lost again; for as has lately been well said: The success and enduring influence of any systematic construction of truth, be it secular or sacred, depends as much upon an exact terminology, as upon close and deep thinking itself. Indeed, unless the results to which the human mind arrives are plainly stated, and firmly fixed in an exact phraseology, its thinking is to very little purpose in the end. "Terms," says Whewell, "record discoveries." That which was seen, it may be with crystal clearness, and in bold outline, in the consciousness of an individual thinker, may fail to become the property and possession of mankind at large, because it is not transferred from the individual to the general mind, by means of a precise phraseology and a rigorous terminology. Nothing is in its own nature more fugacious and shifting than thought; and particularly thoughts upon the mysteries of Christianity. A conception that is plain and accurate in the understanding of the first man becomes obscure and false in that of the second, because it was not

I.

*.

Words the Guardians of Thoughts. 25 grasped and firmly held in the form and proportions with which it first came up, and then handed over to other minds, a fixed and scientific quantity.' And on the necessity of names at once for the preservation and the propagation of truth it has been justly observed: Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.' And this holds good alike of the false and of the true. I think we may observe very often the way in which controversies, after long eddying backward and forward, hither and thither, concentrate themselves at last in some single word which is felt to contain all that the one party would affirm and the other would deny. After a desultory swaying of the battle hither and thither 'the high places of the field,' the critical position, on the winning of which everything turns, is discovered at last. Thus the whole controversy of the Catholic Church with the Arians finally gathers itself up in a single word, 'homoousion;' that with the Nestorians in another, theotokos.' One might be bold to affirm that the entire secret of Buddhism

Shedd, History of Christian Doctrine, vol. i. p. 362; compare Guesses at Truth, 1866, p. 217; and Gerber, Sprache als Kunst, vol. i. p. 145.

Mill, System of Logic, vol. ii. p. 291.

is in the Nirvâna'; for take away the word, and it is not too much to say that the keystone to the whole arch is gone. So too when the medieval Church allowed and then adopted the word 'transubstantiation' (and we know the exact date of this), it committed itself to a doctrine from which henceforward it was impossible to recede. The floating error had become a fixed one, and exercised a far mightier influence on the minds of all who received it, than except for this it would have ever done. It is sometimes not a word, but a phrase, which proves thus mighty in operation. 'Reformation in the head and in the members' was the watchword, for more than a century before an actual Reformation came, of all who were conscious of the deeper needs of the Church. What intelligent acquaintance with Darwin's speculations would the world in general have made, except for two or three happy and comprehensive terms, as 'the struggle for existence,'' the survival of the fittest,' 'the process of natural selection'? Multitudes who else would have known nothing about Comte's system, know something about it when they know that he called it 'the positive philosophy.'

We have been tempted to depart a little, though a very little, from the subject immediately before us. What was just now said of the manner in which language enriches itself does not contradict a prior assertion, that man

Birth of Language.

27

starts with language as God's perfect gift, which he only impairs and forfeits by sloth and sin, according to the same law which holds good in respect of each other of the gifts of heaven. For it was not meant, as indeed was then observed, that men would possess words to set forth feelings which were not yet stirring in them, combinations which they had not yet made, objects which they had not yet seen, relations of which they were not yet conscious; but that up to man's needs, (those needs including not merely his animal wants, but all his higher spiritual cravings,) he would find utterance freely. The great logical, or grammatical, framework of language, (for grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason,) he would possess, he knew not how; and certainly not as the final result of gradual acquisitions, and of reflexion setting these in order, and drawing general rules from them; but as that rather which alone had made those acquisitions possible; as that according to which he unconsciously worked, filled in this framework by degrees with these later acquisitions of thought, feeling, and experience, as one by one they arrayed themselves in the garment and vesture of words.

Here then is the explanation of the fact that language should be thus instructive for us, that it should yield us so much, when we come to analyse and probe it; and yield us the more, the more deeply and accurately we do so. It is full

of instruction, because it is the embodiment, the incarnation, if I may so speak, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which through long centuries they have attained to and won. It stands like the Pillars of Hercules,

to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these. The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular mind have found therein their unconscious voice; and the single kinglier spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of things have oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some one word, which they have launched upon the world, and with which they have enriched it for ever-making in that new word a new region of thought to be henceforward in some sort the common heritage of all. Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning. 'Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and