| At last (Lucretius says and Creech) | |
| They set their wits to work on speech: | |
| And that their thoughts might all have marks | |
| To make them known, these learned clerks | |
| Left off the trade of cracking crowns, | |
| And manufactured verbs and nouns." |
But a far more powerful theologian entered the field in England to save the sacred theory of language—Dr. Adam Clarke. He was no less severe against Philology than against Geology. In 1804, as President of the Manchester Philological Society, he delivered an address in which he declared that, while men of all sects were eligible to membership, "he who rejects the establishment of what we believe to be a divine revelation, he who would disturb the peace of the quiet, and by doubtful disputations unhinge the minds of the simple and unreflecting, and endeavor to turn the unwary out of the way of peace and rational subordination, can have no seat among the members of this institution." The first sentence in this declaration gives food for reflection, for it is the same confusion of two ideas which has been at the root of so much interference of theology with science for the last two thousand years. Adam Clarke speaks of those "who reject the establishment of what 'we believe' to be a divine revelation." Thus comes in that customary begging of the question—the substitution as the real significance of Scripture of "what we believe" for what is.
The intended result, too, of this ecclesiastical sentence was simple enough. It was, that great men, like Sir William Jones, Colebrooke, and their compeers, must not be heard in the Manchester Philological Society in discussion with Dr. Adam Clarke on questions regarding Sanskrit and other matters upon which they knew all that was then known, and Dr. Clarke knew nothing.
But even Clarke was forced to yield to the scientific current. Thirty years later, in his Commentary on the Old Testament, he pitched the claims of the sacred theory on a much lower key. He says: "Mankind was of one language, in all likelihood the Hebrew. . . . The proper names and other significations given in the Scripture seem incontestable evidence that the Hebrew language was the original language of the earth, the language in which God spoke to man, and in which he gave the revelation of his will to Moses and the prophets." Here are signs that this great champion is growing weaker in the faith; in the citations made it will be observed he no longer says "is," but "seems"; and finally we have him saying, "What the first language was is almost useless to inquire, as it is impossible to arrive at any satisfactory information on this point."
In France, during the first half of the nineteenth century, yet
