garded as the subject of a Divine providence. Christianity waited
for that development, and it awaited Christianity. "The Greek tongue
became to the Christian more than it had been to the Roman or the Jew.
The mother-tongue of Ignatius at Antioch was that in which Philo
composed his treatises at Alexandria, and which Cicero spoke at Athens.
It is difficult to state in a few words the important relation which
Alexandria, more especially, was destined to bear to the whole Christian
Church." In that city, the Old Testament was translated into Greek;
there the writings of Plato were diligently studied; there Philo, the
Platonizing Jew, had sought to blend into one system the teachings of
the Old Testament theology and the dialectic speculations of Plato.
Numenius learns of Philo, and Plotinus of Numenius, and the ecstasy of
Plotinus is the development of Philo's intuitions. A _theological
language_ by this means was developed, rich in the phrases of various
schools, and suited to convey the spiritual revelation of Christian
ideas to all the world. "It was not an accident that the New Testament
was written in Greek, the language which can best express the highest
thoughts and worthiest feelings of the intellect and heart, and which is
adapted to be the instrument of education for all nations; nor was it an
accident that the composition of these books and the promulgation of the
Gospels were delayed till the instruction of our Lord, and the writings
of his Apostles could be expressed in the dialect [of Athens and] of
Alexandria."[856] This must be ascribed to the foreordination of Him
who, in the history of nations and of civilizations, "worketh all things
according to the counsel of his own will."

[Footnote 856: Conybeare and Howson, "Life and Epistles of St. Paul,"
vol. i. p. 10.]

Now it is the doctrine of the best philologists that language is a
_growth_. Gradually, and by combined efforts of successive generations,
it has been brought to the perfection which we so much admire in the
idioms of the Bible, the poetry of Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare, and the
prose compositions of Demosthenes, Cicero, Johnson, and Macaulay. The
material or root-element of language may have been the product of mental
instinct, or perhaps the immediate gift of God by revelation; but the
formal element must have been the creation of thought, and the result of
rational combination. Language is really the incarnation of thought;
consequently the