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message of Christ to them would be frustrated. Hence it is that they recorded the ordinary spoken dialects for the guidance of futnre missionaries. It was fortunate that in their time the fateful gramya - grandhika controversy was not present, and the pernicious tradition set up in later years that only the language of the poets, and that also a particular class of poets, should be accepted as the standard of all writing had not yet shown its head. There was no gramya for them, in its contemptuous sense, but only the language of the people, bubbling up with life, the language in which they laughed and wept, loved and hated, defied others and feared them. To grasp the inner life of the people, to enter into the innermost recesses of their minds, and share in active and intimate sympathy the joys and the sorrows of those for whose uplift as they thought, they most honestly dedicated their lives, it was