to the end of the century. In 1697 appeared at Paris
perhaps the most learned of all the books written to prove Hebrew the
original tongue and source of all others. The Gallican Church was
then at the height of its power. Bossuet as bishop, as thinker, and as
adviser of Louis XIV, had crushed all opposition to orthodoxy. The Edict
of Nantes had been revoked, and the Huguenots, so far as they could
escape, were scattered throughout the world, destined to repay France
with interest a thousandfold during the next two centuries. The bones of
the Jansenists at Port Royal were dug up and scattered. Louis XIV stood
guard over the piety of his people. It was in the midst of this series
of triumphs that Father Louis Thomassin, Priest of the Oratory, issued
his Universal Hebrew Glossary. In this, to use his own language, "the
divinity, antiquity, and perpetuity of the Hebrew tongue, with its
letters, accents, and other characters," are established forever and
beyond all cavil, by proofs drawn from all peoples, kindreds, and
nations under the sun. This superb, thousand-columned folio was issued
from the royal press, and is one of the most imposing monuments of human
piety and folly--taking rank with the treatises of Fromundus against
Galileo, of Quaresmius on Lot's Wife, and of Gladstone on Genesis and
Geology.

The great theologic-philologic chorus was steadily maintained, and, as
in a responsive chant, its doctrines were echoed from land to land. From
America there came the earnest words of John Eliot, praising Hebrew
as the most fit to be made a universal language, and declaring it the
tongue "which it pleased our Lord Jesus to make use of when he spake
from heaven unto Paul." At the close of the seventeenth century came
from England a strong antiphonal answer in this chorus; Meric Casaubon,
the learned Prebendary of Canterbury, thus declared: "One language, the
Hebrew, I hold to be simply and absolutely the source of all." And, to
swell the chorus, there came into it, in complete unison, the voice
of Bentley--the greatest scholar of the old sort whom England has ever
produced. He was, indeed, one of the most learned and acute critics of
any age; but he was also Master of Trinity, Archdeacon of Bristol, held
two livings besides, and enjoyed the honour of refusing the bishopric of
Bristol, as not rich enough to tempt him. Noblesse oblige: that Bentley
should hold a brief for the theological side was inevitable, and we
need not b