" But, among the early fathers of the Church, the
only one who seems to have caught an echo of this utterance was
St. Gregory of Nyssa: as a rule, all the other great founders of
Christian theology, as far as they expressed themselves on the
subject, took the view that the original language spoken by the
Almighty and given by him to men was Hebrew, and that from this
all other languages were derived at the destruction of the Tower
of Babel. This doctrine was especially upheld by Origen, St.
Jerome, and St. Augustine. Origen taught that "the language given
at the first through Adam, the Hebrew, remained among that
portion of mankind which was assigned not to any angel, but
continued the portion of God himself." St. Augustine declared
that, when the other races were divided by their own peculiar
languages, Heber's family preserved that language which is not
unreasonably believed to have been the common language of the
race, and that on this account it was henceforth called Hebrew.
St. Jerome wrote, "The whole of antiquity affirms that Hebrew, in
which the Old Testament is written, was the beginning of all
human speech.
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