ard encounters is in getting from the
Hebrew to the Aryan group of languages. How he meets this difficulty may
be imagined from his statement, as follows: "As for the derivation of
words by addition, subtraction, and inversion of the letters, it is
certain that this can and ought thus to be done, if we would find
etymologies--a thing which becomes very credible when we consider that
the Hebrews wrote from right to left and the Greeks and others from
left to right. All the learned recognise such derivations as
necessary;... and... certainly otherwise one could scarcely trace any
etymology back to Hebrew."

Of course, by this method of philological juggling, anything could be
proved which the author thought necessary to his pious purpose.

Two years later, Andrew Willett published at London his Hexapla,
or Sixfold Commentary upon Genesis. In this he insists that the
one language of all mankind in the beginning "was the Hebrew tongue
preserved still in Heber's family." He also takes pains to say that the
Tower of Babel "was not so called of Belus, as some have imagined, but
of confusion, for so the Hebrew word ballal signifieth"; and he quotes
from St. Chrysostom to strengthen his position.

In 1627 Dr. Constantine l'Empereur was inducted into the chair of
Philosophy of the Sacred Language in the University of Leyden. In his
inaugural oration on The Dignity and Utility of the Hebrew Tongue, he
puts himself on record in favour of the Divine origin and miraculous
purity of that language. "Who," he says, "can call in question the fact
that the Hebrew idiom is coeval with the world itself, save such as seek
to win vainglory for their own sophistry?"

Two years after Willett, in England, comes the famous Dr. Lightfoot, the
most renowned scholar of his time in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; but
all his scholarship was bent to suit theological requirements. In his
Erubhin, published in 1629, he goes to the full length of the sacred
theory, though we begin to see a curious endeavour to get over some
linguistic difficulties.

One passage will serve to show both the robustness of his faith and the
acuteness of his reasoning, in view of the difficulties which scholars
now began to find in the sacred theory." Other commendations this tongue
(Hebrew) needeth none than what it hath of itself; namely, for sanctity
it was the tongue of God; and for antiquity it was the tongue of Adam.
God the first founder, and Adam the first speaker of i