Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/312

298 large faction in the Church for advanced views, refers to Hebrew as "spoken by the month of God."

This idea was popularized by the 1508 edition of the Margarita Philosophica, published at Strasburg. That work—in its successive editions a mirror of human knowledge at the close of the middle ages and the opening of modern times—contains a curious introduction to the study of Hebrew. In this it is declared that Hebrew was the original speech, "used between God and man and between men and angels." Its full-page frontispiece represents Moses receiving from God the tables of stone written in Hebrew; and, as a conclusive argument, it reminds us that Christ himself, by choosing a Hebrew maid for his mother, made that his mother-tongue.

It must be noted here, however, that Luther, in one of those outbursts of strong sense which so often appear in his career, enforced the explanation that the words "God said" had nothing to do with the voice or articulation of human language. Still, he evidently yielded to the general view. In the Roman Church at the same period we have a typical example of the theologic method in the statement by Luther's great opponent, Cajetan, that the three languages of the inscription on the cross of Calvary "were the representatives of all languages," and he gives as the reason for this the fact that "the number three denotes perfection."

In 1538 Postillus made a very important endeavor at a comparative study of languages, but with the orthodox assumption that all were derived from one source, namely, the Hebrew. Naturally, Comparative Philology blundered and stumbled on in this path with endless absurdities. The most amazing efforts were made to trace back everything to the sacred language. English and Latin dictionaries appeared, in which every word was traced back to a supposed Hebrew root. No supposition was too absurd in this attempt to square Science with Scripture. It was declared that, as Hebrew is written from right to left, it might be read either way, in order to produce a satisfactory etymology. The whole effort in all this sacred scholarship was, not to find what the truth is; not to see how the various languages are to be classified, or from what source they are really derived, but to demonstrate what was supposed necessary to maintain the truth of Scripture, namely, that all languages are derived from the Hebrew.

This stumbling and blundering, under the sway of this orthodox necessity, is seen among the foremost scholars throughout Europe. About the middle of the sixteenth century the great Swiss scholar, Conrad Gesner, beginning his Mithridates, says, "While of all languages Hebrew is the first and oldest, of all is