for across continents and seas; this is what we hear most talked of. It stings the heart with its sorest jealousies; it is the spur to thousands of injustices and knaveries; it is the case nominative-the thing causing action; the case objective the end of action; and the case possessive to selfishness.

We have another word which sets forth a prominent characteristic of our age- humbug. We have given it a comprehensive use. There is a sort of social abuse, a kind of deceitful villany, not amenable to law, and which would pass current with impunity, had we not this word to fasten disgrace and ridicule upon it. There are public misdemeanors, insolencies, offences which can be punished in no other way but to dishonor them with a word. More's Utopia also well describes a prevalent tendency of our time -the vagaries and dreams of fanatics and lunatics. Panacea has also a most fortunate application to our credulity. We are constantly hearing of new theories of medicine and sects of religion, that have divinely sprung up to heal and save the world of pain and sin.

In the elder ages wealth consisted of flocks and herds. The patriarchs of those ruder times made bargains and exchanges by them. Pecus, a flock, is the root of the Latin pecunia, money. Thus does language preserve and transmit to us customs otherwise uncertain and forgotten. Heretic once had no reference to truth or falsity, and was applied to one who chose for himself; now it tells a sad story of religious intolerance, and carries in it a stinging odium attached to theological opinions. In Greece, a stageplayer was called a hypocrite. By artifice the actors were made to appear of an unnatural size. Hence our name for a religious deceiver. Palaver contains in it the history of a council of African chiefs. It would be easy to multiply instances showing what curious histories are shut up in words. A grand life is the condition of a grand language. "The flower and aroma of a nation is its language."

There are periods when words take a new meaning. We will instance only one - the introduction of Christianity. The Pagan symbols were introduced into the service of the early faith; but they received an interpretation in harmony with its instructions. They served the purposes of books, and recalled to mind events and characters in VOL. XVII.

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religious history. Thus was it with words. It was not necessary for the English language to borrow and invent new terms and phrases to express the new ideas which Christianity engrafted on the Jewish theology, although it created, in fact, a special sacred phraseology. Says a writer in the Christian Inquirer: "When Jesus taught his sublime morality to the people of Judea, and when his Apostles preached that morality to the Greek and Latin nations of their day, they were not obliged to invent a language with which to express their principles and views. They found one already existing adequate to that end; a language receptive of all that Christianity enjoined."

Take a few examples of the way in which Christianity gave a new significance to words. Pastor meant, primarily, one who watched and tended his flocks; from that it was transferred to one who looks after the people of his charge. Preacher was a town crier, one who went to all the public places of the market and the street, to repeat to the ears of all, the edicts of the king, and the laws of the government. Mankind is a name for the human species. It is from kin; and shows that we are all of one kind. Christianity has given a new force to this word by the endearment it has associated with the common brotherhood. Samaritan was a hateful name of reproach and of sectarian strife and exclusiveness; but Christ's immortal parable has made it a coveted title of greatness and honor, and a type of a loving soul, of tender piety, and of world-wide compassion; it is the universal idea of the noblest human sympathy. Talent was simply a sum of money weighed out. Our Saviour applied it to the soul's endowments. It awakens the conception that existence embosoms something of worth. He gave it this profound significance, connecting it with the quantity of spiritual being; making each one feel that he is a spirit, with his solitary quantum of responsibility, treading the eternal paths, and that step by step, as he goes, God's awards go with him. He intensified the idea of conscience-the looking in at one's self, the inward witness of all our being to the sublime conception that in all the by-ways and thick marts of existence each self is surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and is watched with an eye of piercing vision from heaven, which makes the least performance momentous and sacred. He

took the kingdom of earth, with its scheming demagogues and salary seekers, its sly huckstering, unrighteous customs, avaricious strifes, and compromising maxims, to prefigure the kingdom of God, whose citizens are doers of the golden rule, lovers of mercy, humble walkers with God, servers of man in meek ambition, toilers for appetites that are hungry for righteousness, reverent and obedient subjects of the King of kings. The cross, before it was glorified by the crucifixion of the Son of God upon it, was a term of vile reproach, of base ignominy; then it became the symbol of the Divine Love, and we now cluster around it the associations of perfect justice, mercy, and goodness. The world never learned such a definition of charity as Paul gave. See how, from the apostolic point of view, the cities which men build here, melt away and become blended with that which God has built above, with shining mansions and indestructible foundations, with ways of progress leading forever upward, and gates opening into ever-brightning glory. "Tyndale's Testament," says Marsh, "and King James's translation, four-score years later, and the theological controversies of that century, gave to our mother tongue a greater compass of vocabulary, a force and beauty of diction, and a power of precise logical expression, of which scarce any other European tongue was then capable."

In closing, we will notice the Saxon element in the English tongue. English literature commenced with the writings of Wyckliffe, Gower and Chaucer. Classical scholars have often an affectation, or mania, to borrow words. Some of these prove serviceable, and keep their hold in literature such as portray distinct ideas, or show an idea as viewed in a new light, and under different relations. Others are of little use, because there are plenty of good old Saxon terms, and they soon lose their novelty and are dropped. By a too ready adoption of foreign words into the currency of the English language, we are in danger of losing much of its radical strength and historical significance. Marsh has compared the parable of the man who built his house upon the sand, as given by Matthew and Luke. Matthew uses plain Saxon English. The learned evangelist, Luke, employed a Latinized dictionary. "Now," he says, compare the two passages, and say which, to every English ear, is the most impressive:

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"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it." Matthew.

"Against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immedately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great." -Luke.

"There can scarcely be a difference of opinion as to the relative force and beauty of the two versions; and accordingly we find, that while that of Matthew has become proverbial, the narrative of Luke is seldom or never quoted.”

It is estimated by Sharon Turner, who examined passages from the eminent writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, that four-fifths of the words in common use are Saxon. The familiar names of domestic life father, mother, husband, wife, bridegroom, bride, son, daughter, brother, and sister, are all pure Saxon. Also the terms that designate common duties, cares, labors, passions. The words that are the most picturesque and expressive, that occur most frequently in colloquial pleasantry, and the play of humor and wit, and in the use of invective and satire, are Saxon. The words that express moral qualities and feelings-good, holy, wise, true, bad, evil, sin, wicked, right, wrong, love, hate, hope, fear, life death, soul, heaven, hell, are Saxon. God, the good, is Saxon; but Supreme Being is a phrase which came from the French philosophers, and is far less expressive, signifying, as it does, only rank of existence. It is easy to compose whole sentences with only Saxon words. It would be difficult to do so with those of foreign origin, for the smaller words, particles, and auxiliaries, must be Saxon. Camden said, ages ago, "Whereas our tongue is mixed, it is no disgrace. The Italian is pleasant, but without sinews; the French delicate, but, ever nice as a woman, scarce daring to open her lips, for fear of marring her countenance; the Spanish, majestic, but fulsome; the Dutch, manlike, but withal very harsh, as one ready at every word to pick a quarrel. Now we, in borrowing from them, give the strength of the consonant to the Italian; the variety of terminations to the Spanish; and the mollifying of more vowels to the Dutch; and so, like the bees, we gather the honey of their good properties, and leave the dregs to themselves. And thus, when substantialness combineth with

delightfulness, fullness with fineness, seemliness with portliness, and currentness with staidness, how can the language which consisteth of all these, sound other than full of all sweetness."

No substance can be moulded into such a wondrous variety of shapes as words; none can be made to serve so many purposes. In the furnace of the reformer, heated seven times hotter than human nature is wont to be heated, they are moulded into an iconoclastic sledge, and the echoes of his heavy blows, wielded by his royal sense of right, heralding the promise of better eras, stir the languid blood of conservatism, while he welds his convictions of broader principles to the links that lengthen out the chain of liberty and justice. A taste for sentimental perfumery binds them into bouquets, picked from the blossoms of fancy, to regale the poetic sense with its pack of sweets. Sometimes they

appear to the mental vision in rhetorical comets, and sail high overhead with long bushy tails of sparkling brilliancy. Then again they form the bow to wing the arrow of truth, which, shot with practiced skill, quivers and rankles in the right place, piercing through obtuse sensibilities and thickhided prejudices, into the core of conscience. At another time they come in the lightning which satire flashes from the cloud of its indignation, smiting crabbed iniquity, and rocky selfishness, and the ranks of pride and fashion, with its shivering thunderbolt. On another occasion, they are flung from the simple sling of a child's rebuke, and they go where nothing else can reach, sending their reproaches to the very quick and marrow of the spirit, in sharp, stinging smarts. With them the orator sets other brains on fire with the thoughts that are burning coals in his own, and swells other hearts with the billows of emotion that are throbbing in his breast. They are the fountains in which the merry twins of wit and humor play and splash, exciting the bystanders to peals of laughter at their amusing gyrations, as they spatter the spray of ridicule, and spirt the jets of fun into the face of complacent folly, and dignified self-conceit. They wrap in their mystic folds the destiny of the hottest lover, like a decree of exile or adoption, and ravish him with ecstatic hopes, or doom him to the outer darkness of despair. They can pour trouble into the bosom, so that it can neither sleep nor hunger. They can torture