Page:God and His Book.djvu/51

Rh own Ghost, in whom he was well pleased, to write a Bible, I will quote here the first seven verses of Genesis in Hebrew, using, however, the Roman characters:—

It was so considerate of Jehovah to send his Ghost to furnish us with the foregoing beautiful sentences! The only thing to be regretted is that, since he sent the Ghost to write them, he did not come down himself to translate them. But his ways are not as our ways (for which let us be truly thankful), and he has vouchsafed unto us a composition without beginning of words or end of sentences, for which blessed be his holy name. As far back as the days of Nehemiah, as we have seen, the very Jews themselves do not seem to have been able to make head or tail of the language in which the Ghost had written, and only the learned rabbis, who, on the subject, peradventure, knew very little more than the vulgar, pretended to translate and expound.

Strictly speaking, no one language can be translated into any other. A language is not merely a vocabulary of verbal counters with their exact equivalents in other languages; it is a matrix in which may be found the features and lineaments of the national life. I appeal to those who know the Classics best; and I make bold to ask the man who is deeply learned in Latin and who is a master of English if he ever, in all his life, saw a rendering out of the one language into the other which was, in all respects, satisfactory. This can be predicated of Latin, a language known by thousands and well known by tens. Then what of this shepherd's jargon, Hebrew, that, properly speaking, in its written form, seems never to have been a language at all, but only a number of clumsy and