So came the answer to the third question regarding language;
and all three answers, embodied in our sacred books and implanted
in the Jewish mind, supplied to the Christian Church the germs of
a theological development of philology. These germs developed
rapidly in the warm atmosphere of devotion and ignorance of
natural law which pervaded the early Church, and there grew a
great orthodox theory of language, which was held throughout
Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all," for nearly two
thousand years, and to which, until the present century, all
science has been obliged, under pains and penalties, to conform.
There did, indeed, come into human thought at an early
period some suggestions of the modern scientific view of
philology. Lucretius had proposed a theory, inadequate indeed,
but still pointing toward the truth, as follows: "Nature
impelled man to try the various sounds of the tongue, and so
struck out the names of things, much in the same way as the
inability to speak is seen in its turn to drive children to the
use of gestures.
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