There is a pleasant myth told by the inhabitants of the island of Mangaia in the South Pacific. When the Creator of all things had ordered the solid land to rise from the primeval waters, he walked abroad to survey his work. “It is good,” said he aloud to himself. “Good,” answered an echo from a neighbouring hill. “What!” exclaimed the Creator. “Is some one here already? Am not I first?” “I first,” answered the echo. Therefore the Mangaians assert that earliest of all existences is the bodiless Voice.[91] It is their way of saying, “In the beginning was the Word.”
Not only may we call it the first, it is also the mightiest of the unseen agencies which mould man and his destinies.
“Power over men,” remarks Count Tolstoï in one of his essays, “lies not in material force, but in thought and its clear expression.” Disraeli, that subtlest of diplomats, once said, “We govern men with—words.”
No idea can be clearly conveyed to another unless there is a word to express it. Inward thought and outward utterance are the correlated conditions of intelligent advancement. The spoken word evokes in the mind of the hearer the picture, the emotion, the reasoning, which is occupying our own. A thousand minds are brought instantly to bear on the same thought by the words in the mouth of one. I cannot place too high the instant and magical effect of the word.
Not only does it convey a new thought to the mind, but it is itself the begetter of thought. It is a seed sown, which grows and branches, bearing flower and fruit, beauteous and everlasting, or noxious and destructive.
Through the faculty of speech, social life becomes possible; on it depends the sweet interchange of souls; by it we are led to think in unison; through it we share the meditations of the philosopher, and the inspired visions of the poet and the prophet.
If there is any way in which the spirits of the sky and air, the hosts of the Divine, can touch and teach our souls, it must be chiefly through the spoken word.
Every religion of the world bears witness to this. There is no other element in them in which all join with like unanimity. From the rudest to the ripest they echo the verse of the evangelist philosopher when he wrote: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
The highest teachings of them all are expressed in the formula: “And the word of the Lord came saying—”
We may go back to the earliest forms of the ancient Egyptian religion, and we find the doctrine that the man who had learned and could pronounce the divine words revealed through the god Thoth (Thought, Mind), by their utterance would be elevated to the god, and be blended with him, as one and inseparable. “The primary idea concerning the ritual formulas was assimilation to God, brought about by the power of the words themselves.”[92]