Henceforward we only have efforts to save theological appearances,
and these only by men whose zeal outran their 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 English-speaking
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 we hear the emninent 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 century the
most absurd known attempt to prove Hebrew the primitive tongue
belongs to the youngest of the continents, Australia. In the year
1857 was printed at Melbourne _The Triumph of Truth, or a Popular
Lecture on the Origin of Languages_, by B. Atkinson, M. R. C.
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