Again,
Rowland Jones tried to prove that Celtic was the primitive
tongue, and that it passed through Babel unharmed. Still another
effect was made by a Breton to prove that all languages took
their rise in the language of Brittany. All was chaos. There was
much wrangling, but little earnest controversy. Here and there
theologians were calling out frantically, beseeching the Church
to save the old doctrine as "essential to the truth of
Scripture"; here and there other divines began to foreshadow the
inevitable compromise which has always been thus vainly attempted
in the history of every science. But it was soon seen by thinking
men that no concessions as yet spoken of by theologians were
sufficient. In the latter half of the century came the bloom
period of the French philosophers and encyclopedists, of the
English deists, of such German thinkers as Herder, Kant, and
Lessing; and while here and there some writer on the theological
side, like Perrin, amused thinking men by his flounderings in
this great chaos, all remained without form and void.
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