Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

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202
FROM BABEL TO COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY.
Church has always accepted them and accepts them now as
" additional proofs of the truth of Scripture." A little jug-
gling with words, a little amalgamation of texts, a little judicious
suppression, a little imaginative deduction, a little
I unctuous phrasing, and the thing is done. One great service
^ this eminent and kindly Catholic champion undoubtedly
rendered : by this acknowledgment, so widely spread in his
published lectures, he made it impossible for Catholics o
Protestants longer to resist the main conclusions of science,
Henceforward we only have efforts to save theological a
pearances, and these only by men whose zeal outran thai
discretion.
On both sides of the Atlantic, down to a recent period,
we see these efforts, but we see no less clearly that they are
mutually destructive. Yet out of this chaos among Englishspeaking
peoples the new science began to develop steadily
and rapidly. Attempts did indeed continue here and there
to save the old theory. Even as late as 1859 ^^ hear the
eminent Presbyterian divine, Dr. John Cumming, from his
pulpit in London, speaking of Hebrew as " that magnificent
tongue that mother-tongue, from which all others are but
distant and debilitated progenies." ^^
But the honour of producing in the nineteenth centur]|
Vby
the most absurd known attempt to prove Hebrew the prirai
tive tongue belongs to the youngest of the continents, A
tralia. In the year 1857 was printed at Melbourne The Ti
umph of Truth, or a Popular Lecture on the Origin of Languageii
B. Atkinson, ^(I. R^C. RT^ what ever ^at may mean*
/ In this work, starting witirThe assertion that " the Hebrevt
was the primary stock whence all languages were derived,
the author states that Sanskrit is " a dialect of the Hebrew,
and declares that " the manuscripts found with mumm
agree precisely with the Chinese version of the Psalms1
David." It all sounds like Alice in Wonderland. Curiously
enough, in the latter part of his book, evidently thinking
that his views would not give him authority among fastid-
ious philologists, he says, " A great deal of our consent to
the foregoing statements arises in our belief in the Diviv
inspiration of the Mosaic account of the creation of tnl
world and of our first parents in the Garden of Eden." A
I