OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO REVELATION—No. IV.
BY P.T. RUSSELL.
LANGUAGE AND RELIGION, FROM WHENCE?
There are conditions under which circumstantial evidence is the best possible testimony. These conditions are found inseparably connected with our present subject. That men now possess the same powers of body and mind that they always manifested is disputed by no intelligent individual. Those powers have been, through all the ages, precisely the same both in number and kind. Has the history of humanity furnished a single case in which a person, perfectly deaf during all his life, had the ability to speak words? Such is unknown in the history of the past, and also in the records of the present. History is as blank at this point, as a barren oasis. All the other faculties are as perfect with the deaf as they are with those whose hearing is perfect. Their inventive genius is equally vigorous; this being true, why should the defect of the ear deprive them of the power of speech? Will the Deist answer this question? Mr. Skeptic, as you are in the same difficulty with the Deist, you may help him if you choose. If you are, as you pretend, free and fearless thinkers, give us your thoughts upon this question. If you are cowardly, then stand off and sneer at the question which you dare not try to answer. The facts developed at this point ought to be remembered, and the question, why can the deaf, described, never talk? ought to be pressed home to every heart.
MATHEMATICS WILL AID US HERE.
When we see a constant increase in the number of persons or things in an undeviating ratio, with the aid of mathematics we can pass back to the first of the series, to the first man living at the base of the human series. Ever remember that there can not be a series without a unit lying at its base.
Why do the life-long deaf never talk? You answer: All Adam's children learn to talk by hearing others talk, and as those deaf ones never heard, so they never learned to talk. Very well. The first man, at the beginning of the series of humanity, had no powers or faculties which his descendants do not possess, and as they all have been under the necessity of learning to talk by hearing others talk, will you unbelievers and skeptics tell us, if you can, how that first man became a talker? Can the life-long deaf talk as well as those whose ears are perfect? No. Well, then, the difficulty rests upon you. That you may remember it, I will repeat it once more, it is this: who did the first man hear in order to learn the talker's trade?
WHERE DID LANGUAGE COME FROM?
Do you tell us that society made language? Then society must be older than language, for the maker is always, of necessity, older than the thing made. But without language there could be no interchange of ideas, and without this society could not exist. Where there is no intelligent communication of ideas we never think of society. Society does not exist where there is no intelligent communication of ideas between persons. The trees in the grove are never spoken of as a society. They are not and can not be in the social state. Neither are the brutes around us. Man is the only being upon earth capable of becoming a constituent element or part of society. Mr. Blair says, in his lectures on Belleslettres, "It would be extremely difficult to conceive how society could exist without language." Now, as society can not exist without language, it is certain that society could not be the author of language, for the author must be older than his production. But Mr. Blair springs another difficulty. It is in these words: "It would be equally difficult to conceive how language could exist without society." A moment's reflection will satisfy all reasonable persons that language can not exist without society, and that which can not exist without the other can not be the maker—author—of the other, for the maker must be older than the thing made. Then, as neither of these could exist without the other, neither could be the author of the other. So language and society are both effects, and their cause is outside of or antecedent to both, for every effect has an antecedent cause.