eir structure.

How this result was reached, and why the Church has so fully accepted
it, I shall endeavour to show in the present chapter. At a very early
period in the evolution of civilization men began to ask questions
regarding language; and the answers to these questions were naturally
embodied in the myths, legends, and chronicles of their sacred books.

Among the foremost of these questions were three: "Whence came
language?" "Which was the first language?" "How came the diversity of
language?"

The answer to the first of these was very simple: each people naturally
held that language was given it directly or indirectly by some special
or national deity of its own; thus, to the Chaldeans by Oannes, to the
Egyptians by Thoth, to the Hebrews by Jahveh.

The Hebrew answer is embodied in the great poem which opens our sacred
books. Jahveh talks with Adam and is perfectly understood; the serpent
talks with Eve and is perfectly understood; Jahveh brings the animals
before Adam, who bestows on each its name. Language, then, was God-given
and complete. Of the fact that every language is the result of a growth
process there was evidently, among the compilers of our sacred books, no
suspicion.

The answer to the second of these questions was no less simple. As,
very generally, each nation believed its own chief divinity to be "a god
above all gods,"--as each believed itself "a chosen people,"--as each
believed its own sacred city the actual centre of the earth, so each
believed its own language to be the first--the original of all. This
answer was from the first taken for granted by each "chosen people," and
especially by the Hebrews: throughout their whole history, whether the
Almighty talks with Adam in the Garden or writes the commandments on
Mount Sinai, he uses the same language--the Hebrew.

The answer to the third of these questions, that regarding the diversity
of languages, was much more difficult. Naturally, explanations of this
diversity frequently gave rise to legends somewhat complicated.

The "law of wills and causes," formulated by Comte, was exemplified here
as in so many other cases. That law is, that, when men do not know the
natural causes of things, they simply attribute them to wills like their
own; thus they obtain a theory which provisionally takes the place of
science, and this theory forms a basis for theology.

Examples of this recur to any thinking reader of history. Before
the simpler