Sensuous
stage of
language.
BOOK
measure accurately the influence which it has exercised on the human intellect and on human morality. If in our search we find that phrases and emblems, to which we now attach a purely spiritual signification, have acquired this mea.ning gradually as the ruder ideas which marked the infancy of the human race faded from the mind, we shall not allow old associations and prejudices to stand in the place of evidence, or suffer the discovery to interfere with or weaken moral or religious convictions with which these phrases or emblems have no inseparable connexion. The student of the history of religion can have no fear that his faith will receive a shock from which it cannot recover, if his faitli is placed in Him with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning, and whose work human passion can neither mar nor hinder. He can walk in confidence by the side of the student of language and mythology, and be content to share his labour, if he hopes that such efforts may one day " lay bare the world-wide foundations of the eternal kingdom of God." ^
In truth, the evidence which must guide us at the outset of the inquiry can be furnished by the science of language alone. The very earliest records to which we can assign any historical character refer to states of society which are comparatively late developements. The history of words carries us back to an age in which not a single abstract term existed, in which human speech expressed mere bodily wants and mere sensual notions, i/vhile it conveyed no idea either of morality or of religion. If every name which throughout the whole world is or has been employed as a name of the One Eternal God, the Maker and Sustainer of all things, was originally a name only for some sensible object or phenomenon, it follows that there was an age the duration of which we cannot measure, but during which man had not yet risen to any consciousness of his relation to the great Cause of all that he saw or felt around him. If all the words which now denote the most sacred relations of kindred and afiinity were at the first names conveying no such special meaning, if the words father, brother, sister, daughter, were words denoting merely the power or occupation of the persons spoken of, then there was a time during which the ideas now attached to the words had not yet been developed. But the sensuousness which in one of its results pro- duced mythology could not fail to influence in whatever degree the religious growth of mankind. This sensuousness, inevitable in the infancy of the human race, consisted in ascribing to all physical objects the same life of which men were conscious themselves. They
' Max Miiller, " Semitic Monotheism," Chips, &c., i. 378.
' See book i. ch. ii.
