th verbal and literal, of
the Scripture text"; and with impassioned eloquence he assailed the
blasphemers who dared question the divine origin of the Hebrew points.
But this was really the last great effort. That the case was lost was
seen by the fact that Danzius felt obliged to use other missiles than
arguments, and especially to call his opponents hard names. From this
period the old sacred theory as to the origin of the Hebrew points may
be considered as dead and buried.

II. THE SACRED THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN ITS SECOND FORM.

But the war was soon to be waged on a wider and far more important
field. The inspiration of the Hebrew punctuation having been given up,
the great orthodox body fell back upon the remainder of the theory,
and intrenched this more strongly than ever: the theory that the Hebrew
language was the first of all languages--that which was spoken by the
Almighty, given by him to Adam, transmitted through Noah to the world
after the Deluge--and that the "confusion of tongues" was the origin of
all other languages.

In giving account of this new phase of the struggle, it is well to go
back a little. From the Revival of Learning and the Reformation had come
the renewed study of Hebrew in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
and thus the sacred doctrine regarding the origin of the Hebrew language
received additional authority. All the early Hebrew grammars, from that
of Reuchlin down, assert the divine origin and miraculous claims of
Hebrew. It is constantly mentioned as "the sacred tongue"--sancta
lingua. In 1506, Reuchlin, though himself persecuted by a large faction
in the Church for advanced views, refers to Hebrew as "spoken by the
mouth of God."

This idea was popularized by the edition of the Margarita Philosophica,
published at Strasburg in 1508. That work, in its successive editions
a mirror of human knowledge at the close of the Middle Ages and the
opening of modern times, contains a curious introduction to the study of
Hebrew, In this it is declared that Hebrew was the original speech
"used between God and man and between men and angels." Its full-page
frontispiece represents Moses receiving from God the tables of stone
written in Hebrew; and, as a conclusive argument, it reminds us that
Christ himself, by choosing a Hebrew maid for his mother, made that his
mother tongue.

It must be noted here, however, that Luther, in one of those outbursts
of strong sense which so often appea