Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

BREAKING DOWN OF THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW.
dred languages, with the grammars of more than forty. It
should be said to his credit that Hervas dared point out with
especial care the limits of the Semitic famil}^ of languages,
and declared, as a result of his enormous studies, that the
various languages of mankind could not have been derived
from the Hebrew.
While such work was done in Catholic Spain, Protes-
tant Germany was honoured by the work of Adelung. It
contained the Lord's Prayer in nearly five hundred lan-
S^uages and dialects, and the comparison of these, early in
the nineteenth century, helped to end the sway of theo-
logical philology.
But the period which intervened between Leibnitz and
;his modern development was a period of philological chaos.
[t began mainly with the doubts which Leibnitz had forced
ipon Europe, and ended only with the beginning
191
of the
itudy of Sanskrit in the latter half of the eighteenth century,
nd with the comparisons made by means of the collections
f Catharine, Hervas, and Adelung at the beginning of the
dneteenth. The old theory that Hebrew was the original
language had gone to pieces ; but nothing had taken its place
[s a finality.
Great authorities, like Buddeus, were still cited
n behalf of the narrower belief ;
but everywhere researches,
norganized though they were, tended to destroy it. The
tory of Babel continued indeed throughout the whole eightenth
century to hinder or warp scientific investigation, and
curious illustration of this fact is seen in the book of
very
-ord Nelme on The Origin and Elements of Language. He
eclares that connected with the confusion was the cleaving
f America from Europe, and he regards the most terrible
hapters in the book of Job as intended for a description of
jie Flood, which in all probability Job had from Noah himblf.
Again, Rowland Jones tried to prove that Celtic was
le primitive tongue, and that it passed through Babel un-
irmed. Still another effect was made by a Breton to prove
lat all languages took their rise in the language of Brittany.
II was chaos. There was much wrangling, but little ear-
ist controversy. Here and there theologians were calling
it frantically, beseeching the Church to save the old doc-
ine as "essential to the truth of Scripture " ;
here and there