WORDS COMMON TO ALL IDIOMS.

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diversified races of man are separated from each other by insurmountable barriers." Comparatively unknown idioms, like the Mongolian, African, American, and Polynesian tongues, have, in our day, begun to arrange themselves in vast groups, closely allied to each other by resemblance in essential features. Thus the two great Northern scholars, Keyser of Christiania and Retzius of Stockholm, are prepared to prove that the Iberian race, whose very existence had, until late, been doubted, extended in remote times widely through Western Europe and was intimately connected with the Lapponic aborigines of Scandinavia. It is in the same way that Bunsen's profound researches in Egyptian antiquities, and the labors of the distinguished Jewish scholars, Fürst of Leipzig and Delitzsch of Halle, have led them to believe in a radical affinity between the two great and apparently quite distinct families of Shemitic and Japhetic languages, thus establishing an internal and close relationship between the two greatest classes of tongues.

Thus new relations and new analogies between apparently unconnected idioms are constantly discovered in precise proportion, as more comprehensive studies and more minute researches add to our meagre stock of knowledge. In no instance has this, probably, been more strikingly illustrated than in the study of those mysterious words or fragments of words, which forty-two centuries after the confusion of Babel are still found to be the common heirloom of certain races, scattered all over the earth, and which now, carefully gathered as historical documents and deciphered by the aid of science, are probably the most important and certainly the most interesting evidences of the original unity of tongues.

Whilst thus every science and every branch of knowledge adds to the means by which we may form suppositions and strengthen our surmises as to the first origin of language, positive results have not yet been obtained. Comparative Philology, while it furnishes no argument against the unity of the human race, does not, on the other hand, pretend as yet to prove it conclusively. The question itself is not essential for the science of Language; it might be decided without furnishing material aid or a new starting point, and the same principles have to be studied, whether all idioms have one common fountain-head or various and independent sources. It remains, therefore, now as before, one of the great purposes of the science of Language, patiently to investigate such facts, as they gradually come to light, and by generalizing them upon scientifically safe principles, to establish, at least, a certain test and standard for the various views entertained on the subject.

Within this limited sphere of action Comparative Philology has, of late, made perhaps more rapid and striking progress than of the kindred sciences. It owes this success in part any to the fact, that, having made its appearance among the latter only quite recently, it manifests in all its attributes and tendencies emphatically the spirit of modern inquiry, and advances with the vigor of youth and the eagerness of the discoverer..

OFFICE OF CHRISTIANITY.

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CHAPTER IV.

HISTORY OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY.

The Egyptians and Greeks-The Romans-The Jews and Eastern NationsChange produced by Christianity.

ANTIQUITY never presumed to trace the affiliation of nations to any thing but their common descent; to prove it from a community of speech was a task and a triumph reserved for modern science. The ancients lacked the very interest in other nations which prompts us to inquire into their peculiarities and characteristic features. They knew not that Christianity which teaches us to feel, at the same time, an interest in man individually as a brother, and in humanity as a great whole. It is Christianity that every where, at least indirectly, presumes and affirms the infinite dignity and value of man as a creature, exclusively concerned in a vast and mysterious economy of restoration to a state of moral beauty and power, which he has strangely forfeited in some former age. Christianity alone presents us all men, of every color, language or race, Gentile or Jew, as equal in one sense, and that the most important: equally participating in the ruin and the restoration of the species; equally interested in the benefits of the Gospel salvation, and joint heirs of its promises.

How different from this spirit was the narrow patriotism of

the selfish, proud ancients, cultivated as a virtue, and yet so far below the simple duty of the "love of our neighbor." It is well known that the proverbial dislike of Egyptians to foreigners was carried so far as to consider the eating with a Hebrew an abomination, and Herodotus tells us that to kiss the face of a Greek, to use his knife, or even to taste of food prepared with Greek utensils, was a profanation in their eyes. Surely Hebrew and Greek words must have had little to interest their scholars. The Greeks, whose loftiest moral aspirations resulted in patriotism, divided all mankind into two great divisions: Greeks and Barbarians. For the first they cherished a considerable but well-deserved regard; of the latter they cared not to know more than their assumed inferiority. Their interest in language, such as it was, did not extend beyond the limits of their native land. Alcibiades, it is true, once boxed the ears of a schoolmaster, because he had not a copy of Homer in his house; but it was his love of the national poet only that prompted him; of foreign poets he knew nothing and expected nothing. The Greeks bequeathed the same unfortunate views and feelings to their degenerated descendants, the proud and ignorant Byzantines, and, even in our day, the races of the East know but themselves and the "Franks," as the Chinese acknowledge neither brother nor friend among the nations of the earth, and know, beyond the Celestial Empire, but "outside Barbarians." The Romans had no absolute standard by which to judge man, but considered him a gregarious being, designed for social uses and purposes. Hence they knew but Rome and Roman citizens, the city and the men who best fulfilled these purposes. For these they fought and died; but all other men were contempt

uously styled barbarians or ayλwooo, as Pollux has it; and bitter experience, the saddest fate of all European nations, has hardly taught them yet that warm and affectionate interest which our faith teaches us to feel in all men.

The Romans had, moreover, neither the spirit nor the talent of observation. Even men like Tacitus hardly condescended to notice what appeared then irrelevant details. And still he did not hesitate, in his Germania, to divide the Germans into Germans and Suevi, merely because the former combed their hair obliquely and tied it in a knot, whilst the latter strove to push their refractory hair back and fixed it on the top of their head! A few remarks on the dress of women is the whole result of his observations in another direction! All the more praiseworthy, therefore, are the few faint glimmerings of higher views and better principles which occur, here and there, even in the days of Roman glory. Polybius, for instance, showed that Roman influence had enlarged his Greek mind, when he says, in the introduction to his great work, that nations are but members of one body, and that the history of one cannot be understood without that of others. Political sagacity, if nothing else, led the Roman Senate to inquire into the literature of other nations, and to learn even from their despised neighbors; it was with such views that they ordered works like that on agriculture by the Carthaginian Mago to be translated into Latin. Isolated instances like Cicero's poem of Aratus on the Stars, and the translations of a few Greek dramas, made by Ennius, Nævius, and Pacuvius, cannot controvert the general principle.

Like the Roman and the Greek, all nations of antiquity of which history speaks, were more or less distinguished by their