Starting then from this point, that 'Christians' was a title given to the disciples by the heathen, what may we deduce from it further? At Antioch they first obtained this name—at the city, that is, which was the head-quarters of the Church's missions to the heathen, in the same sense as Jerusalem had been the head-quarters of the mission to the seed of Abraham. It was there, and among the faithful there, that a conviction of the world-wide destination of the Gospel arose; there it was first plainly seen as intended for all kindreds of the earth. Hitherto the faithful in Christ had been called by their adversaries, and indeed often were still called, 'Galileans,' or 'Nazarenes,'—both names which indicated the Jewish cradle wherein the Church had been nursed, and that the world saw in the new Society no more than a Jewish sect. But it was plain that the Church had now, even in the world's eyes, chipped its Jewish shell. The name 'Christians,' or those of Christ, while it told that Christ and the confession of Him was felt even by the heathen to be the sum and centre of this new faith, showed also that they comprehended now, not all which the Church would be, but something of this; saw this much, namely, that it was no mere sect and variety of Judaism, but a Society with a mission and a destiny of its own. Nor will the thoughtful reader fail to observe that the coming up of this name is by closest juxtaposition connected in the sacred narrative, and still more closely in the Greek than in the English, with the arrival at Antioch, and with the preaching there, of that Apostle, who was God's appointed instrument for bringing the Church to a full sense that the message which it had, was not for some men only, but for all. As so often happens with the rise of new names, the rise of this one marked a new epoch in the Church's life, and that it was entering upon a new stage of its development. [Footnote: Renan (Les Apôtres pp. 233-236) has much instruction on this matter. I quote a few words; though even in them the spirit in which the whole book is conceived does not fail to make itself felt: L'heure où une création nouvelle reçoit son nom est solennelle; car le nom est le signe définitif de l'existence. C'est par le nom qu'un être individuel ou collectif devient lui-même, et sort d'un autre. La formation du mot 'chrétien' marque ainsi la date précise où l'Eglise de Jésus se sépara du judaïsme…. Le christianisme est complètement détaché du sein de sa mère; la vraie pensée de Jésus a triomphé de l'indécision de ses premiers disciples; l'Eglise de Jérusalem est dépassée; l'Araméen, la langue de Jésus, est inconnue à une partie de son école; le christianisme parle grec; il est lancé définitivement dans le grand tourbillon du monde grec et romain; d'où il ne sortira plus.] It is a small matter, yet not without its own significance, that the invention of this name is laid by St. Luke,—for so, I think, we may confidently say,—to the credit of the Antiochenes. Now the idle, frivolous, and witty inhabitants of the Syrian capital were noted in all antiquity for the invention of nicknames; it was a manufacture for which their city was famous. And thus it was exactly the place where beforehand we might have expected that such a title, being a nickname or little better in their mouths who devised it should first come into being.
This one example is sufficient to show that new words will often repay any amount of attention which we may bestow upon them, and upon the conditions under which they were born. I proceed to consider the causes which suggest or necessitate their birth, the periods when a language is most fruitful in them, the sources from which they usually proceed, with some other interesting phenomena about them.
And first of the causes which give them birth. Now of all these causes the noblest is this—namely, that in the appointments of highest Wisdom there are epochs in the world's history, in which, more than at other times, new moral and spiritual forces are at work, stirring to their central depths the hearts of men. When it thus fares with a people, they make claims on their language which were never made on it before. It is required to utter truths, to express ideas, remote from it hitherto; for which therefore the adequate expression will naturally not be forthcoming at once, these new thoughts and feelings being larger and deeper than any wherewith hitherto the speakers of that tongue had been familiar. It fares with a language then, as it would fare with a river bed, suddenly required to deliver a far larger volume of waters than had hitherto been its wont. It would in such a case be nothing strange, if the waters surmounted their banks, broke forth on the right hand and on the left, forced new channels with a certain violence for themselves. Something of the kind they must do. Now it was exactly thus that it fared—for there could be no more illustrious examples—with the languages of Greece and Rome, when it was demanded of them that they should be vehicles of the truths of revelation.
These languages, as they already existed, might have sufficed, and did suffice, for heathenism, sensuous and finite; but they did not suffice for the spiritual and infinite, for the truths at once so new and so mighty which claimed now to find utterance in the language of men. And thus it continually befell, that the new thought must weave a new garment for itself, those which it found ready made being narrower than that it could wrap itself in them; that the new wine must fashion new vessels for itself, if both should be preserved, the old being neither strong enough, nor expansive enough, to hold it. [ Footnote: Renan, speaking on this matter, says of the early Christians: La langue leur faisait défaut. Le Grec et le Sémitique les trahissaient également. De là cette énorme violence que le Christianisme naissant fit au langage (Les Apôtres, p. 71)] Thus, not to speak of mere technical matters, which would claim an utterance, how could the Greek language possess a word for 'idolatry,' so long as the sense of the awful contrast between the worship of the living God and of dead things had not risen up in their minds that spoke it? But when Greek began to be the native language of men, to whom this distinction between the Creator and the creature was the most earnest and deepest conviction of their souls, words such as 'idolatry,' 'idolater,' of necessity appeared. The heathen did not claim for their deities to be 'searchers of hearts,' did not disclaim for them the being 'accepters of persons'; such attributes of power and righteousness entered not into their minds as pertaining to the objects of their worship. The Greek language, therefore, so long as they only employed it, had not the words corresponding. [Footnote: [Greek: Prosopolaeptaes, kardiognostaes.] It, indeed, could not have had them, as the Jewish Hellenistic Greek could not be without them. How useful a word is 'theocracy'; what good service it has rendered in presenting a certain idea clearly and distinctly to the mind; yet where, except in the bosom of the same Jewish Greek, could it have been born? [Footnote: We preside at its birth in a passage of Josephus, Con. Apion. ii. 16.]
These difficulties, which were felt the most strongly when the thought and feeling that had been at home in the Hebrew, the original language of inspiration, needed to be transferred into Greek, reappeared, though not in quite so aggravated a form, when that which had gradually woven for itself in the Greek an adequate clothing, again demanded to find a suitable garment in the Latin. An example of the difficulty, and of the way in which the difficulty was ultimately overcome, will illustrate this far better than long disquisitions. The classical language of Greece had a word for 'saviour' which, though often degraded to unworthy uses, bestowed as a title of honour not merely on the false gods of heathendom, but sometimes on men, such as better deserved to be styled 'destroyers' than 'saviours' of their fellows, was yet in itself not unequal to the setting forth the central office and dignity of Him, who came into the world to save it. The word might be likened to some profaned temple, which needed a new consecration, but not to be abolished, and another built in its room. With the Latin it was otherwise. The language seemed to lack a word, which on one account or another Christians needed continually to utter: indeed Cicero, than whom none could know better the resources of his own tongue, remarkably enough had noted its want of any single equivalent to the Greek 'saviour.' [Footnote: Hoc [Greek: soter] quantum est? ita magnum ut Latinè uno verbo exprimi non possit.] 'Salvator' would have been the natural word; but the classical Latin of the best times, though it had 'salus' and 'salvus,' had neither this, nor the verb 'salvare'; some, indeed, have thought that 'salvare' had always existed in the common speech. 'Servator' was instinctively felt to be insufficient, even as 'Preserver' would for us fall very short of uttering all which 'Saviour' does now. The seeking of the strayed, the recovery of the lost, the healing of the sick, would all be but feebly and faintly suggested by it, if suggested at all. God 'preserveth man and beast,' but He is the 'Saviour' of his own in a more inward and far more endearing sense. It was long before the Latin Christian writers extricated themselves from this embarrassment, for the 'Salutificator' of Tertullian, the 'Sospitator' of another, assuredly did not satisfy the need. The strong good sense of Augustine finally disposed of the difficulty. He made no scruple about using 'Salvator'; observing with a true insight into the conditions under which new words should be admitted, that however 'Salvator' might not have been good Latin before the Saviour came, He by his coming and by the work had made it such; for, as shadows wait upon substances, so words wait upon things. [Footnote: Serm. 299. 6: Christus Jesus, id est Christus Salvator: hoc est enim Latine Jesus. Nec quaerant grammatici quam sit Latinum, sed Christiani, quam verum. Salus enim Latinum nomen est; salvare et salvator non fuerunt haec Latina, antequam veniret Salvator: quando ad Latinos venit, et haec Latina fecit. Cf. De Trin. 13. 10: Quod verbum [salvator] Latina lingua antea non habebat, sed habere poterat; sicut potuit quando voluit. Other words which we owe to Christian Latin, probably to the Vulgate or to the earlier Latin translations, are these—'carnalis,' 'clarifico,' 'compassio,' 'deitas' (Augustine, Civ. Dei, 7. i), 'glorifico,' 'idololatria,' 'incarnatio,' 'justifico,' 'justificatio,' 'longanimitas,' 'mortifico,' 'magnalia,' 'mundicors,' 'passio,' 'praedestinatio,' 'refrigerium' (Ronsch, Vulgata, p. 321), 'regeneratio,' 'resipiscentia,' 'revelatio,' 'sanctificatio,' 'soliloquium,' 'sufficientia,' 'supererogatio,' 'tribulatio.' Many of these may seem barbarous to the Latin scholar, but there is hardly one of them which does not imply a new thought, or a new feeling, or the sense of a new relation of man to God or to his fellow-man. Strange too and significant that heathen Latin could get as far as 'peccare' and 'peccatum,' but stopped short of 'peccator' and 'peccatrix.'] Take another example. It seemed so natural a thing, in the old heathen world, to expose infants, where it was not found convenient to rear them, the crime excited so little remark, was so little regarded as a crime at all, that it seemed not worth the while to find a name for it; and thus it came to pass that the word 'infanticidium' was first born in the bosom of the Christian Church, Tertullian being the earliest in whose writings it appears.
Yet it is not only when new truth, moral or spiritual, has thus to fit itself to the lips of men, that such enlargements of speech become necessary: but in each further unfolding of those seminal truths implanted in man at the first, in each new enlargement of his sphere of knowledge, outward or inward, the same necessities make themselves felt. The beginnings and progressive advances of moral philosophy in Greece, [Footnote: See Lobeck, Phrynichus, p. 350.] the transplantation of the same to Rome, the rise of the scholastic, and then of the mystic, theology in the Middle Ages, the discoveries of modern science and natural philosophy, these each and all have been accompanied with corresponding extensions in the domain of language. Of the words to which each of these has in turn given birth, many, it is true, have never travelled beyond their own peculiar sphere, having remained purely technical, or scientific, or theological to the last; but many, too, have passed over from the laboratory and the school, from the cloister and the pulpit, into everyday use, and have, with the ideas which they incorporate, become the common heritage of all. For however hard and repulsive a front any study or science may present to the great body of those who are as laymen in regard of it, there is yet inevitably such a detrition as this continually going forward, and one which it would be well worth while to trace in detail.
Where the movement is a popular one, stirring the heart and mind of a people to its depths, there these new words will for the most part spring out of their bosom, a free spontaneous birth, seldom or never capable of being referred to one man more than another, because in a manner they belong to all. Where, on the contrary, the movement is more strictly theological, or has for its sphere those regions of science and philosophy, where, as first pioneers and discoverers, only a few can bear their part, there the additions to the language and extensions of it will lack something of the freedom, the unconscious boldness, which mark the others. Their character will be more artificial, less spontaneous, although here also the creative genius of a single man, as there of a nation, will oftentimes set its mark; and many a single word will come forth, which will be the result of profound meditation, or of intuitive genius, or of both in happiest combination—many a word, which shall as a torch illuminate vast regions comparatively obscure before, and, it may be, cast its rays far into the yet unexplored darkness beyond; or which, summing up into itself all the acquisitions in a particular direction of the past, shall furnish a mighty vantage- ground from which to advance to new conquests in those realms of mind or of nature, not as yet subdued to the intellect and uses of man.
'Cosmopolite' has often now a shallow or even a mischievous use; and he who calls himself 'cosmopolite' may mean no more than that he is not a patriot, that his native country does not possess his love. Yet, as all must admit, he could have been no common man who, before the preaching of the Gospel, launched this word upon the world, and claimed this name for himself. Nor was he a common man; for Diogenes the Cynic, whose sayings are among quite the most notable in antiquity, was its author. Being demanded of what city or country he was, Diogenes answered that he was a 'cosmopolite'; in this word widening the range of men's thoughts, bringing in not merely a word new to Greek ears, but a thought which, however commonplace and familiar to us now, must have been most novel and startling to those whom he addressed. I am far from asserting that contempt for his citizenship in its narrower sense may not have mingled with this his challenge for himself of a citizenship wide as the world; but there was not the less a very remarkable reaching out here after truths which were not fully born into the world until He came, in whom and in whose Church all national differences and distinctions are done away.
As occupying somewhat of a middle place between those more deliberate word-makers and the multitude whose words rather grow of themselves than are made, we must not omit him who is a maker by the very right of his name—I mean, the poet. That creative energy with which he is endowed, 'the high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet,' will not fail to manifest itself in this region as in others. Extending the domain of thought and feeling, he will scarcely fail to extend that also of language, which does not willingly lag behind. And the loftier his moods, the more of this maker he will be. The passion of such times, the all-fusing imagination, will at once suggest and justify audacities in speech, upon which in calmer moods he would not have ventured, or, venturing, would have failed to carry others with him: for it is only the fluent metal that runs easily into novel shapes and moulds. Nor is it merely that the old and the familiar will often become new in the poet's hands; that he will give the stamp of allowance, as to him will be free to do, to words which hitherto have lived only on the lips of the people, or been confined to some single dialect and province; but he will enrich his native tongue with words unknown and non-existent before—non-existent, that is, save in their elements; for in the historic period of a language it is not permitted to any man to do more than work on pre-existent materials; to evolve what is latent therein, to combine what is apart, to recall what has fallen out of sight.
But to return to the more deliberate coining of words. New necessities have within the last few years called out several of these deliberate creations in our own language. The almost simultaneous discovery of such large abundance of gold in so many quarters of the world led some nations so much to dread an enormous depreciation of this metal, that they ceased to make it the standard of value—Holland for instance did so for a while, though she has since changed her mind; and it has been found convenient to invent a word, 'to demonetize' to express this process of turning a precious metal from being the legal standard into a mere article of commerce. So, too, diplomacy has recently added more than one new word to our vocabulary. I suppose nobody ever heard of 'extradition' till within the last few years; nor of 'neutralization' except, it might be, in some treatise upon chemistry, till in the treaty of peace which followed the Crimean War the 'neutralization' of the Black Sea was made one of the stipulations. 'Secularization,' in like manner, owes its birth to the long and weary negotiations which preceded the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Whenever it proved difficult to find anywhere else compensation for some powerful claimant, there was always some abbey or bishopric which with its revenues might be seized, stripped of its ecclesiastical character, and turned into a secular possession. Our manifold points of contact with the East, the necessity that has thus arisen of representing oriental words to the western world by means of an alphabet not its own, with the manifold discussions on the fittest equivalents, all this has brought with it the need of a word which should describe the process, and 'transliteration' is the result.