es." But, among the early fathers of the Church, the only one
who seems to have caught an echo of this utterance was St. Gregory of
Nyssa: as a rule, all the other great founders of Christian theology, as
far as they expressed themselves on the subject, took the view that the
original language spoken by the Almighty and given by him to men was
Hebrew, and that from this all other languages were derived at the
destruction of the Tower of Babel. This doctrine was especially upheld
by Origen, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine. Origen taught that "the
language given at the first through Adam, the Hebrew, remained among
that portion of mankind which was assigned not to any angel, but
continued the portion of God himself." St. Augustine declared that, when
the other races were divided by their own peculiar languages, Heber's
family preserved that language which is not unreasonably believed to
have been the common language of the race, and that on this account it
was henceforth called Hebrew. St. Jerome wrote, "The whole of antiquity
affirms that Hebrew, in which the Old Testament is written, was the
beginning of all human speech."

Amid such great authorities as these even Gregory of Nyssa struggled in
vain. He seems to have taken the matter very earnestly, and to have
used not only argument but ridicule. He insists that God does not speak
Hebrew, and that the tongue used by Moses was not even a pure dialect
of one of the languages resulting from "the confusion." He makes man
the inventor of speech, and resorts to raillery: speaking against his
opponent Eunomius, he says that, "passing in silence his base and abject
garrulity," he will "note a few things which are thrown into the midst
of his useless or wordy discourse, where he represents God teaching
words and names to our first parents, sitting before them like some
pedagogue or grammar master." But, naturally, the great authority
of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine prevailed; the view suggested by
Lucretius, and again by St. Gregory of Nyssa, died, out; and "always,
everywhere, and by all," in the Church, the doctrine was received that
the language spoken by the Almighty was Hebrew,--that it was taught
by him to Adam,--and that all other languages on the face of the earth
originated from it at the dispersion attending the destruction of the
Tower of Babel.(414)

(414) For Lucretius's statement, see the De Rerum Natura, lib. v,
Munro's edition, with translation, Cambridge