growth of a language, its affluence, comprehension, and
fullness must depend on the vigor and activity of thought, and the
acquisition of general ideas. Language is thus the best index of
intellectual progress, the best standard of the intellectual attainment
of an age or nation. The language of barbaric tribes is exceedingly
simple and meagre; the paucity of general terms clearly indicating the
absence of all attempts at classification and all speculative thought.
Whilst the language of educated peoples is characterized by great
fullness and affluence of terms, especially such as are expressive of
general notions and abstract ideas. All grammar, all philology, all
scientific nomenclature are thus, in fact, _psychological deposits_,
which register the progressive advancement of human thought and
knowledge in the world of mind, as the geological strata bear testimony
to the progressive development of the material world. "Language," says
Trench, "is fossil poetry, fossil history," and, we will add, fossil
philosophy. Many a single word is a concentrated poem. The record of
great social and national revolutions is embalmed in a single term.[857]
And the history of an age of philosophic thought is sometimes condensed
and deposited in one imperishable word.[858]

[Footnote 857: See Trench "On the Study of Words," p. 20, where the word
"frank" is given as an illustration.]

[Footnote 858: For example, the cosmos of the Pythagoreans, the eide of
the Platonists, and the ataraxia of the Stoics.]

If, then, language is the creation of thought, the sensible vesture with
which it clothes itself, and becomes, as it were, incarnate--if the
perfection and efficiency of language depends on the maturity and
clearness of thought, we conclude that the wonderful adequacy and
fitness of the Greek language to be the vehicle of the Divine thought,
the medium of the most perfect revelation of God to men, can only be
explained on the assumption that the ages of philosophic thought which,
in Greece, preceded the advent of Christianity, were under the immediate
supervision of a providence, and, in some degree, illuminated by the
Spirit of God.

Greek philosophy must therefore have fulfilled a propaedeutic office for
Christianity. "As it had been intrusted to the Hebrews to preserve and
transmit the heaven-derived element of the Monotheistic religion, so it
was ordained that, among the Greeks, all seeds of human culture should
unfold themselv