284 CHAPTER XXIII. MAN AND WOMAN. WHATEVER may be our notion as to the character of man's first language, and however we may endeavour to explain its origin and employment, there can be no doubt in any mind that articulate speech is the vehicle of human reason, in contradistinction to whatever may be the vocal medium of expressing impulse and sensation in brutal minds. And as man, if distinctly created, did not pass into the activities of breathing life inspired by Heaven, fresh from the moulding touch of the Divine hand, with the stamp of incompleteness in any of his faculties, the power of uttering thought in appropriate words must speedily have found occasion for its development and exercise by some process best adapted for the purpose, devised and put in force by Him who made man, with aspirations to hold communion not only with man but also with his Maker. There is really no conceivable mode of manifestation to man's mind but by embodiments that shall influence his senses. If we have abstract ideas, yet these could have been derived only as phenomena were calculated to excite those ideas in the mind as constituted thus to be excited. Some sensible sign must indicate properties and conditions before we can possess metaphysical conceptions. We must perceive an object before we can conceive an idea. There is no teaching but by the senses, and man cannot apprehend anything concerning the Divine nature, but as it pleases God to reveal Himself in a human manner in accommodation to human nature, which is created to be the image and reflex of the Creator. If man, mentally and morally, is to endure as seeing Him who is invisible, except as humanly revealing Himself, the Deity, until so revealed, must remain an abstraction to our minds, inferred to be a person, because will and reason in man persist in saying I am; therefore, as I am a personal being, a personal Being must have originated me. But Christianity not only confirms the inference, but affirms the indwelling of the fulness of the Godhead bodily' in a man, Immanuel, so that the abstract conception of Divine Personality becomes a fact to the Christian believer who sees the Father in the Son revealing Himself in word and deed. There is therefore no outrage to reason in imagining any degree of anthropomorphism,' any degree of Divine accommodation to the faculties of human nature, by which man might feel and know by visible and audible evidence that God Himself was man's inspirer and instructor, in the conception and utterance of thought, in modulated sounds and syllables as the signs of ideas, objects, and emotions. But reason does not warrant the supposition that Omniscience placed two persons together in total ignorance of all things, as 6 6 associates for each other, to evolve a language for themselves by their mutual endeavours to become intelligent and communicative. As a great thinker says, 'Who taught thee to speak?' By that question does he not imply that some one taught the first man to speak? He talks, indeed, of 'the day when two hairy-naked or fig-leaved human figures began, as uncomfortable dummies, anxious no longer to be dumb, but to impart themselves to one another; and endeavoured, with gaspings, gesturings, with unsyllabled cries, with painful pantomime and interjections in a very unsuccessful manner.' surely he is sneering at the imitation theory. No human figures ever held such foolish dumb-show with each other since the first pair, and if we think their lot was thus uncomfortable and unsuccessful, we must impiously imagine their Maker producing an absurdity never otherwise seen in this world. * But No; the Divine method is to prepare one mind for another. And therefore when the first man was endowed with language, however taught, he was qualified to become the teacher of one who should be not only in the position of a companion, but as such grow into intimate endearment as the recipient of instruction from his loving heart. When man had language, he was not long without a being by his side akin in nature to himself, with whom to hold sweet fellowship, who should derive from his own accordant lips and speaking looks * Carlyle's Past and Present, p. 175. the understanding of a soul inspired by love and endowed by Heaven, to utter and convey heaven's own language to another heart and mind made on purpose for unison of thought and feeling with himself. As it was the purpose of the Creator to constitute the first man the federal head of a world's history, the creation of woman was a necessary consequence of man's own existence; and what more fitting to the perfection of the oneness between man and woman than that she should find and feel in him her union with her God, while he should own in her the glorious being given to him by God, in evidence of God's crowning love for the completion of his own being? He for God only, she for God in him,' or rather both for God, because both the one for the other. To learn of him was to know Divinity already humanised; and as the glory of the eternal Light had been softened by a Presence and a Voice to accommodate his reason, so she found a divine Power permanently present to her heart in man. Thus the kindred sociality of natures formed to correspond in mutual meetness was breathed from soul to soul. Thus words laden with the warm incense of the first man's heart and inspired with his inner life, his God-taught spirit, awakened in that other outward and inward life of woman a responsive vibration, imitative as an echo, to the music of his uttered love and thought. Thus the man himself was known by his words at first, for every man is what he is in utterance; and thus all are to be judged by their words, the outflow of their wills in signs that speak their spirit. Sermo imago animi; qualis vir, talis est oratio, and thus the first man became an oracle to the first woman, as man with reason divinely taught will ever be, as surely as truth belongs to love and both belong to reason. We have seen a prisoned spirit in the person of a deaf-mute, in whom reason seemed waiting in vain to hear a voice that should enkindle a new life and satisfy a felt want and impart the fulfilment of the heart's longing as it watched the beaming eye, the trembling lip, the changeful waves and colour of the cheek, glowing with a feeling to which words were useless. And we have fancied how that imprisoned soul would have loved one who like the Son of God could have unstopped the deafened ear and liberated that soul from silence, and taught it to drink knowledge from the fountain of sweet music and of speech. But here was a soul free and open to receive from a man, a Son of God, intelligence and love fit to bind two souls together. And thus together were the first man and woman bound by words and thoughts and corresponding faculties in life and fellowship. What a marvel of wisdom and benevolence is the gift of speech with its adaptation to the receiving ear and the perceiving soul behind it! What a wondrous, common, forgotten thing is the structure of the aural and vocal instruments by which mind so rules matter as to send thought and feeling along the pulses of the air from spirit to spirit, toned and attuned to express and awaken the faculties and affections of the soul by words! Surely the first pair who learned to converse together |