elderly gentlemen, who received their theology in their youth, and who
in their old age have watched over it with jealous care to keep it well
protected from every fresh breeze of thought. Naturally, a theological
professor inaugurated under such auspices endeavours to propitiate his
audience. Sennert goes to great lengths both in his address and in his
grammar, published nine years later; for, declaring the Divine origin of
Hebrew to be quite beyond controversy, he says: "Noah received it from
our first parents, and guarded it in the midst of the waters; Heber and
Peleg saved it from the confusion of tongues."

The same doctrine was no less loudly insisted upon by the greatest
authority in Switzerland, Buxtorf, professor at Basle, who proclaimed
Hebrew to be "the tongue of God, the tongue of angels, the tongue of the
prophets"; and the effect of this proclamation may be imagined when we
note in 1663 that his book had reached its sixth edition.

It was re-echoed through England, Germany, France, and America, and,
if possible, yet more highly developed. In England Theophilus Gale set
himself to prove that not only all the languages, but all the learning
of the world, had been drawn from the Hebrew records.

This orthodox doctrine was also fully vindicated in Holland. Six
years before the close of the seventeenth century, Morinus, Doctor of
Theology, Professor of Oriental Languages, and pastor at Amsterdam,
published his great work on Primaeval Language. Its frontispiece depicts
the confusion of tongues at Babel, and, as a pendant to this, the
pentecostal gift of tongues to the apostles. In the successive chapters
of the first book he proves that language could not have come into
existence save as a direct gift from heaven; that there is a primitive
language, the mother of all the rest; that this primitive language still
exists in its pristine purity; that this language is the Hebrew. The
second book is devoted to proving that the Hebrew letters were divinely
received, have been preserved intact, and are the source of all other
alphabets. But in the third book he feels obliged to allow, in the face
of the contrary dogma held, as he says, by "not a few most eminent
men piously solicitous for the authority of the sacred text," that the
Hebrew punctuation was, after all, not of Divine inspiration, but a late
invention of the rabbis.

France, also, was held to all appearance in complete subjection to the
orthodox idea up