e, p. lxxxiii; also his Sacred and Profane History
of the World, 1753; revised edition by Wheeler, London, 1858. For the
argument regarding the difficulty of bringing the fishes to be named
into the Garden of Eden, see Massey, Origin and Progress of Letters,
London, 1763, pp. 14-19.

It had continued, then, the universal belief in the Church that the
names of all created things, except possibly fishes, were given by Adam
and in Hebrew; but all this theory was whelmed in ruin when it was found
that there were other and indeed earlier names for the same animals
than those in the Hebrew language; and especially was this enforced on
thinking men when the Egyptian discoveries began to reveal the pictures
of animals with their names in hieroglyphics at a period earlier than
that agreed on by all the sacred chronologists as the date of the
Creation.

Still another part of the sacred theory now received its death-blow.
Closely allied with the question of the origin of language was that of
the origin of letters. The earlier writers had held that letters were
also a divine gift to Adam; but as we go on in the eighteenth century
we find theological opinion inclining to the belief that this gift was
reserved for Moses. This, as we have seen, was the view of St. John
Chrysostom; and an eminent English divine early in the eighteenth
century, John Johnson, Vicar of Kent, echoed it in the declaration
concerning the alphabet, that "Moses first learned it from God by
means of the lettering on the tables of the law." But here a difficulty
arose--the biblical statement that God commanded Moses to "write in a
book" his decree concerning Amalek before he went up into Sinai.
With this the good vicar grapples manfully. He supposes that God had
previously concealed the tables of stone in Mount Horeb, and that
Moses, "when he kept Jethro's sheep thereabout, had free access to these
tables, and perused them at discretion, though he was not permitted
to carry them down with him." Our reconciler then asks for what other
reason could God have kept Moses up in the mountain forty days at a
time, except to teach him to write; and says, "It seems highly probable
that the angel gave him the alphabet of the Hebrew, or in some other way
unknown to us became his guide."

But this theory of letters was soon to be doomed like the other parts
of the sacred theory. Studies in Comparative Philology, based upon
researches in India, began to be reenforced by