e storm. But there was no name by which He could be
called. There might be names for the storm-wind and the thunderbolt,
but these were not the names applicable to Him that rideth upon the
heavens of heavens, which were of old. Again, when after a wild and
tearful night the sun dawned in the morning, smiling on man--when
after a dreary and deathlike winter spring came again with its
sunshine and flowers, there were feelings of joy and gratitude, of
love and adoration in the heart of every human being; but though there
were names for the sun and the spring, for the bright sky and the
brilliant dawn, there was no word by which to call the source of all
this gladness, the giver of light and life.

At the time when we may suppose that the first attempts at finding a
name for God were made, the divergence of the languages of mankind had
commenced. We cannot dwell here on the causes which led to the
multiplicity of human speech; but whether we look on the confusion of
tongues as a natural or supernatural event, it was an event which the
science of language has proved to have been inevitable. The ancestors
of the Semitic and the Aryan nations had long become unintelligible to
each other in their conversations on the most ordinary topics, when
they each in their own way began to look for a proper name for God.
Now one of the most striking differences between the Aryan and the
Semitic forms of speech was this:--In the Semitic languages the roots
expressive of the predicates which were to serve as the proper names
of any subjects, remained so distinct within the body of a word, that
those who used the word were unable to forget its predicative meaning,
and retained in most cases a distinct consciousness of its appellative
power. In the Aryan languages, on the contrary, the significative
element, or the root of a word, was apt to become so completely
absorbed by the derivative elements, whether prefixes or suffixes,
that most substantives ceased almost immediately to be appellative,
and were changed into mere names or proper names. What we mean can
best be illustrated by the fact that the dictionaries of Semitic
languages are mostly arranged according to their roots. When we wish
to find the meaning of a word in Hebrew or Arabic we first look for
its root, whether triliteral or biliteral, and then look in the
dictionary for that root and its derivatives. In the Aryan languages,
on the contrary, such an arrangement would be extreme