E BELIEVE, to be a divine revelation." Thus comes in that customary
begging of the question--the substitution, as the real significance of
Scripture, of "WHAT WE BELIEVE" for what IS.

The intended result, too, of this ecclesiastical sentence was simple
enough. It was, that great men like Sir William Jones, Colebrooke, and
their compeers, must not be heard in the Manchester Philological Society
in discussion with Dr. Adam Clarke on questions regarding Sanskrit and
other matters regarding which they knew all that was then known, and Dr.
Clarke knew nothing.

But even Clarke was forced to yield to the scientific current. Thirty
years later, in his Commentary on the Old Testament, he pitched the
claims of the sacred theory on a much lower key. He says: "Mankind was
of one language, in all likelihood the Hebrew.... The proper names and
other significations given in the Scripture seem incontestable evidence
that the Hebrew language was the original language of the earth,--the
language in which God spoke to man, and in which he gave the revelation
of his will to Moses and the prophets." Here are signs that this great
champion is growing weaker in the faith: in the citations made it will
be observed he no longer says "IS," but "SEEMS"; and finally we have him
saying, "What the first language was is almost useless to inquire, as it
is impossible to arrive at any satisfactory information on this point."

In France, during the first half of the nineteenth century, yet
more heavy artillery was wheeled into place, in order to make a last
desperate defence of the sacred theory. The leaders in this effort were
the three great Ultramontanes, De Maistre, De Bonald, and Lamennais.
Condillac's contention that "languages were gradually and insensibly
acquired, and that every man had his share of the general result,"
they attacked with reasoning based upon premises drawn from the book of
Genesis. De Maistre especially excelled in ridiculing the philosophic or
scientific theory. Lamennais, who afterward became so vexatious a thorn
in the side of the Church, insisted, at this earlier period, that "man
can no more think without words than see without light." And then, by
that sort of mystical play upon words so well known in the higher ranges
of theologic reasoning, he clinches his argument by saying, "The Word is
truly and in every sense 'the light which lighteth every man that cometh
into the world.'"

But even such champions as these co