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.
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