Some men reason on the assumption that the Maker of man never dictated any law for man's guidance and to teach the need of faith as the gift of God to those who seek to surmount temptation and escape from the miseries of sin. But God has not left the world without witness of His existence as a lawgiver. Every man feels that a law has been uttered somewhere which he has broken; and who will assert that man is not everywhere, if not insane, under the influence of a power that convinces him of sin? However he may word the law which he has broken, he owns, by his fears, that it is against the Supreme that he has sinned. Where is there a people without natural conscience active enough within the soul to enable them to distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad, in a moral sense? Dr. Colenso informs us, moreover, that the Zulus have seeds of religious truth planted in their minds by the Divine Hand, and that they recognise the existence of the double heart the constant strife of the flesh and spirit.'*

This one thing, then, is the mark of thinking manhe sins, and is conscious of it. As Ovid says:

Video meliora proboque;

Deteriora sequor.

That wonderful heathen, Plato, says: The nature of man is degenerated-it is torn to pieces by lusts. The prime evil is inborn in man.'t The harmony of the

* Dr. Colenso On Missions, in the Journal of the Anthropological Society, July 1865, p. clxiii.

+ Gorgias.

soul is destroyed.'* He also says: "God alone can restore it, and bring man the true cure, as of life from the dead.' †

The response to this expression of law in the conscience is the law orally and verbally expressed and written in the Ten Commandments, summed up by Christ as love to God, and to man as loved of God. Every man's real character, morally, and perhaps intellectually also, is in keeping with his habit of obeying or resisting the dictates of his conscience as enlightened both mediately and immediately, by oral law and by the sight of true love. It may be questioned, however, whether the natural conscience is ever properly and fully awakened to the knowledge of sin without being taught God's law as expressed in words; and it is certain that the conscience once awakened to the fact of the iniquity of sin, as committed against the law of love, finds no rest without the knowledge of Christ as the Saviour from sin and the giver of eternal life, by the importation of His own spirit. A man, in fact, knows sin only when he knows God's law; and as he must hear of that law before he feels sin, so he must hear of Christ's love before he can find a saviour from sin.

It is only as man knows God that he can love God, and God alone can reveal Himself; and only as man loves God can he own God Himself as an authority to govern man, for love alone is authority sufficient to command positive and entire obedience, resignation,

*Politics.

† Gorgias et Leg.

and submission of will. Knowledge itself is unsafe without love. Therefore, when man was first taught truth, he found it one with the utterance of love. Intuition could only be a ground of love and knowledge, and without a personal manifestation in a human manner, man could neither know God nor conceive His character as an object of love. This natural truth is the basis of Christianity, and yet Christianity is a system surpassing man's invention; for what man, untaught by Heaven, could dare to assert the union of the Divine and human natures in one person, who should conquer death by being subjected to that penalty, and that any man having faith in the fact was endowed with a right to call God Father? We accept the knowledge of His love as a positive truth without considering that He himself must have revealed that truth by words addressed to our reason, because He who is Love and Light to man is so in language as well as thought. The first man needed to be told of God's thoughts towards him as much as we do, and therefore we conclude that the voice of the Divine Logos was the first to be heard by man; and that without actual words and meanings being thus adapted and addressed to the soul and ear of man, he could neither have acquired language nor have learned anything concerning his spiritual relationship to his Maker. If this thought demands explanation, it will probably be found, if we endeavour to reason on the origin of human language.

R

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CHAPTER XX.

THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

No being on earth but man needs language because no other requires teaching, but the very structure of his mind demands instruction in order to its complete development, and therefore he requires to be taught language. No other creature is capable of mental improvement; no other has a mind to improve. And no being incapable of perceiving the unuttered reason, the latent mental and moral capacity of man, could have informed the intellect or inspired the conscience of man. And as He who imparted the power to learn truth could alone impart the truth to be learnt, so He alone could devise the appropriate means of conveying thought from one mind to another by the ready channel of the ear in the utterance of articulate sounds. He who made the mind of man thus to be awakened, could alone so accommodate that mind as to teach the first man to think while teaching him to speak. The same love that provides in the parent a teacher of words and thoughts to the child, was required to act in the same direct manner towards the first human being, who was truly the son of God. Is any degree of accommodation

to such a being as a newly-created man unbecoming in the Almighty? To teach man as only he could be taught -that is, just as a child is taught by a parent--were no condescension in the Omnipotent, but only consistency; for He it is who speaks in the heart of every loving parent. He cannot condescend in the vulgar sense, because He is the same in the least as in the greatest; there is no minimus in maximo to Him; atoms are as much His care as worlds; and if the first man could have no other teacher God taught him. Is not the spirit of man made on purpose to receive God's thoughts in words as those of love? And can love condescend? No, because it is love, and must accomplish whatever is needed to reveal itself; and what is that but the revelation of the Eternal Reason to the responsive created reason by all means which the condition of man may render necessary

?

Language was as much required to meet the first man's necessities as a thinking and social being, as food for his bodily sustenance. Words and meanings are the food for the rational soul, and who could supply them to that soul at first but the soul's Creator? The gift of language is implied in man's possession of a capacity to receive it; but language is not a gift in the same sense as the capacity for language. A language is not made by one being to be bestowed at once upon another. The spirit, will, and intellect must be trained progressively, as if by lesson on lesson, to receive it. There must be sympathy between the giver and receiver, a correspondence between the teacher and the taught,