Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

II
SACRED THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN ITS SECOND FORM. 183
only the Greek and Latin, but also the Italian, the Spanish,
the French, the German, the Flemish, the English, and many
others from all languages." As the merest tyro in philology
can now see, the great difficulty that Guichard encounters
is in getting from the Hebrew to the Aryan group of lan-
guages. How he meets this difficulty may be imagined from
his statement, as follows :
" As for the derivation of words
by addition, subtraction, and inversion of the letters, it is
certain that this can and_ought thus to be done, if we would
find etymologies a thing which becomes very credible when
we consider that the Hebrews wrote from right to left and
the Greeks and others from left to right. All the learned
recognise such derivations as necessary ;
. . . and . . . cer-
tainly otherwise one could scarcely trace any etymology
back to Hebrew."
Of course, by this method of philological juggling, any-
thing could be proved which the author thought necessary
to his pious purpose.
Two years later, Andrew Willett published at London
his Hexapla, or Sixfold Commentary upon Genesis. In this he
insists that the one language of all mankind in the beginning
"was the Hebrew tongue preserved still in Heber's family."
He also takes pains to say that the Tower of Babel " was
not so called of Belus, as some have imagined, but of con-
"
fusion, for so the Hebrew word ballal ;
signifieth and he
quotes from St. Chrysostom to strengthen his position.
In 1627 Dr. Constantine I'Empereur was inducted into
the chair of Philosophy of the Sacred Language in the University
of Leyden. In his inaugural oration on The Dignity
and Utility of the Hebrew Tongue, he puts himself on record
in favour of the Divine origin and miraculous purity of that
"
language. Who," he "
says, can call in question the fact
that the Hebrew idiom is coeval with the world itself, save
"
such as seek to win vainglory for their own ?
sophistry
Two years after Willett, in England, comes the famous
Dr. Lightfoot, the most renowned scholar of his time in
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin ; but all his scholarship was bent
to suit theological requirements. In his Erubhin, published
in
1629, he goes to the full length of the sacred theory,
though we begin to see a curious endeavour to get over