Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

SACRED THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN ITS SECOND FORM, jgi
or from what source they are really derived but to demonstrate
what was supposed necessary to maintain what was
then held to be the truth of Scripture ; namely,
that all lan-
guages are derived from the Hebrew.
This stumbling and blundering, under the sway of orthodox
necessity, was seen among the foremost scholars throughout
Europe. About the middle of the sixteenth century the
great Swiss scholar, Conrad Gesner, beginning \\v& Mithridates,
says, " While of all languages Hebrew is the first and oldest,
of all is alone pure and unmixed, all the rest are much mixed,
for there is none which has not some words derived and corrupted
from Hebrew."
Typical, as we approach the end of the sixteenth century,
are the utterances of two of the most noted English
divines. First of these may be mentioned Dr. William Fulke,
Master of Pembroke Hall, in the University of Cambridge.
In \\\% Discovery of the Dangerous Rock of the Romish Church,
published in 1580, he speaks of "the Hebrew tongue, . . .
the first tongue of the world, and for the excellency thereof
"
the holy tongue.'
Yet more emphatic, eight years later, was another emi-
called '
nent divine. Dr. William Whitaker, Regius Professor of Divinity
and Master of St. John's College at Cambridge. In his
Disputation on Holy Scripture, first printed in 1588, he says:
" The Hebrew is the most ancient of all languages, and was
that which alone prevailed in the world before the Deluge
and the erection of the Tower of Babel. For it was this
which Adam used and all men before the Flood, as is mani-
fest from the Scriptures, as the fathers testify." He then
proceeds to quote passages on this subject from St. Jerome,
St. Augustine, and others, and cites St. Chrysostom in support
of the statement that " God himself showed the model
and method of writing when he delivered the Law written
by his own finger to Moses." *
* For the whole scriptural argument, embracing the various texts on which the
sacred science of Philology was founded, with the use made of such texts, see Ben-
fey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland, Miinchen, 1869, pp. 22-26.
As to the origin of the vowel points, see Benfey, as above : he holds that they be-
gan to be inserted in the second century A. D., and that the process lasted until
about the tenth. For Raymundus and his Pugio Fidei, see G. L. Bauer, Prolegomena