The audience has generally consisted mainly of
estimable elderly gentlemen, who received their theology in their
youth, and who in their old age have watched over it with jealous
care to keep it well protected from every fresh breeze of
thought. Naturally, a theological professor inaugurated under
such auspices endeavours to propitiate his audience. Sennert goes
to great lengths both in his address and in his grammar,
published nine years later; for, declaring the Divine origin of
Hebrew to be quite beyond controversy, he says: "Noah received it
from our first parents, and guarded it in the midst of the
waters; Heber and Peleg saved it from the confusion of tongues."
The same doctrine was no less loudly insisted upon by the
greatest authority in Switzerland, Buxtorf, professor at Basle,
who proclaimed Hebrew to be "the tongue of God, the tongue of
angels, the tongue of the prophets"; and the effect of this
proclamation may be imagined when we note in 1663 that his book
had reached its sixth edition.
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