XI.
THE CREATION OF NEW LETTERS.
It is a fact not generally known or realized that if it were not for the Bible some of the richest and most beautiful languages of antiquity would now be entirely lost to us; nay, more, there are whole nations who would in all probability never have had a written language or literature except for the Bible.
Of the ancient Semitic tongues only two remain living languages, that is, the Arabian, and, in a modified form, the Syrian. The Chaldee, the Samaritan, the Assyrian, the Phoenician, the Ethiopia are dead and would hardly be known to us except for the remnants of them which we trace through the sacred books of the Scripture. We have no relic of the Hebrew tongue but the Bible; and this language, with all its wondrous musical forms, its strange capacity of eliciting and expressing the deepest feelings of the human heart, and its charming touches of Oriental genius, would be entirely dead outs, if we had not the Bible.
Our own English tongue bears the traces of another written language, now entirely dead, but which was actually created by the study of the Bible. I mean the Gothic, of which no other written document exists to-day except some portion of the Holy Scriptures translated by Ulfilas in the fourth century. When he came as a missionary among the Goths he found them ignorant of the art of writing. In order to Christianize the rude people he invented for them an alphabet, gathered their children into Christian schools, and taught them to write and to read. The first book, and the last, too, of that once powerful race was a Bible. When the Goths had died out in the ninth century, their written copy of the inspired word of God still continued to live, and we can trace in our unabridged dictionaries to-day the original meaning of many a Saxon word by reference to this solitary copy of a part of the Sacred Scriptures.
What has been said of the Gothic is equally true of the written language of the Armenians (for whom the anchorite Miesrop devised an alphabet and translated the Bible); also of the Slavonic nations (for whom SS. Cyril and Methodius made an alphabet and Bible translation); and others—races who, like our own Indian tribes, lived only long enough as representatives of a separate language to learn the rudiments of Christianity.
All this must convince us that those who have the required means should seek to master one or several of the Biblical languages, since the ancient tongues, less subject to the caprice of political changes than those of later ages, open to the mind avenues of original thought and sentiment which modern literature and education have not been capable of retaining without them.
You will say that it is impossible for most, or perchance nearly all of you to give yourselves to the study of Hebrew or Greek or Latin in order to gain that profit from the intelligent reading of the Bible which it yields to the man of learning. Very well; if so, the fact of our deficiency must caution us in reading and rashly interpreting according to our fancy what can only be determined by the wisdom of those who act the legitimate part of divinely-appointed judges. As in the Old Law the High-priest and the great council of the Sanhedrin were the infallible interpreters of the divine decrees, so the Church, which is the continuation and perfection of the Synagogue, completes the Messianic mission by interpreting for each succeeding generation the meaning of the inspired words written in the sacred volume.