from his high estate; if as low as he could be at first, he has wonderfully elevated himself. If he was not provided with language as soon as he needed it, he was worse conditioned than any of the human race now existing. The question is not whether God is a respecter of persons, and less a loving father to the Australian and the negro than to the man whom he had immediately created, but Did God make man more degraded than man is permitted to make himself? Why man is permitted to sink into a condition from which he can be raised by Divine love and mercy is a question that belongs alone to the scheme of providence in which that love and mercy are revealed.

The wisdom of Omnipotence will doubtless be manifested to all intelligences even more clearly in the means directed to the recovery of mankind from all evil than in creation itself, which, as a divine work, without an intervening will, was necessarily all good. Creation is less a revelation of God's mind and character than the method of salvation or healing of human nature. The process of salvation, however mysterious in the sovereignty and disposal of the providential arrangements connected with it, is a process of means in which human as well as divine agency is engaged; and, therefore, the means are themselves modes in which the divine character is most fully revealed in humanity. But creation was an operation without means, being the immediate act of Divinity, with which, as human intelligence could have nothing to do, so neither can it have any capacity to comprehend.

In the elevation of mankind from the savageness and barbarism into which sin and its consequences have immersed the majority of our race, thoughts derived from Heaven and spoken by men are constantly engaged; nor without them can mankind emerge from degradation. No other power and instrumentality are equal to the occasion; no other could so completely bind man to man, and make all men feel that God is with them both to think and to do. And as the earliest civilisations known to us were due to the dominance of traditional truths concerning the divine claims on the obedience of man, and as those civilisations fell into ruin in proportion as those claims were forgotten, so now there is no power at work to elevate the degraded races of mankind but that which reaches after them with those revealed truths which all the civilised nations more or less possess, and to which their high standing in polity and commerce is alone to be attributed.

True knowledge is the knowledge of the Divine will and working on which all good laws are founded. With the increase of this knowledge man's capacity to think and speak aright extends. His language itself grows in comprehensiveness, copiousness, and power, in proportion as intelligent, instructed, and religious minds intermingle their enquiries and opinions. Their faith, their reason, and their good feeling enlarge together, and with pure thought comes also purity of tongue; nor is it beyond conception, that the very words in which the Divine mind was first uttered unto man

should yet be found upon his lips as he improves in his capacity to entertain divine ideas.

The spirit of Babel lives in all tongues, and the confusion of language is involved in the diffusion and growth of mankind. When a language becomes fixed and refined it begins to die; the people that employed it die also, leaving the new race to new associations— and living language can no more be fixed than a living people. It is modified because it grows, and it grows because it lives. When the whole earth is compassed by the same truth, the nations may have the same tongue; when all men consent to derive their ideas from God's works and God's word, the language which contains the best expositions of true science, and the best translation of the Bible, will prevail; and as it stands at present, the English, from its force, simplicity, directness, and comprehensive character, bids fair to become the universal language at last, if allowed to grow in a natural manner, and not impoverished by pedantic attempts to improve it.

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CHAPTER XXI.

THE FIRST LANGUAGE NECESSARILY TAUGHT.

SEE how speedily the deaf-mute learns to talk to himself in the finger alphabet with a kind of shorthand rapidity while actively thinking, and how he even dreams of things as it were on the fingers, as they move with their instructed association also in sleep. But by a still more laborious and patient skill the deaf-mute has been taught actually to speak with distinctness and correct accent as if capable of hearing. This striking triumph over natural defect is achieved by instructing the deaf-mute to observe and imitate the movements of the organs employed in speaking. Those organs and their actions are so carefully demonstrated by the example of the skilled teacher, that the pupil is by slow degrees at length able with quick eye so to catch the movements of the lips and chest of the speaker as to learn language by sight instead of hearing. The skill necessarily exercised in teaching such persons thus, so to say, to see words and correctly to express themselves is marvellous. The writer for several successive days held long conversations of a very mixed character with a lady thus instructed, and she so perfectly caught his

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words by sight, and replied with such correctness of modulation and connectedness of utterance, as to strike him so powerfully with the evident force of her intelligence that he had not the slightest suspicion that she was deaf, though afterwards informed that she was not only deaf but born deaf, and had never heard a single sound.

This lady's intellect had actually been, so to say, developed with the use of words acquired only by sight. Until thus taught, her mind-power of course appeared as defective as her means of communication, for the reasoning faculties are fully exercised only in connection with language. Hence, in Hebrew idiom, to think is to speak to one's own heart. As William Humboldt says, 'Man is man by speech.' Therefore, it follows that He who gave the first man his rational faculties also provided means by which they were called into proper exercise, that is by imparting to him speech by actual instruction through the natural channel-the ear. Man could speak when he found there was speech. And where could man have found this fulfilment of his reason had not He whose thoughts are uttered in creation also by some means actually addressed man's ear in words, as signs of things, and of moods of thought in relation to things? He who has so lovingly arranged our relationships, that by an imitative sympathy the young child gradually catches the significance of syllables breathed from loving lips, and echoes back at length the utterance of thought and feeling in kindred accents, could not leave His first created human child—a child