Author Description

From the PREFACE. The hidden depths both of the wisdom and knowledge of God were manifest, not only in the revelation of his will contained in the Scriptures of truth, but in the manner of giving that revelation, and in the language in which it was given. Egypt had wisdom, but it was enshrined in hieroglyphics so obscure that their meaning faded centuries ago from the memory of mankind, and for many successive ages no man on earth could penetrate their mysteries. Assyria and Babylon had literature, art, and science; but with a language written in seven or eight hundred cuneiform signs, some of them having fifty different meanings, what wonder is it that for more than two thousand years the language and literature of these nations was lost, buried, and forgotten? The vast literature of China has survived the changes of centuries, but the list of different characters, which in a dictionary of the second century numbered 9353, and in the latest imperial Chinese Dictionary numbers 43,- 960, - some of them requiring fifty strokes of the pencil to produce them, - shows how unfit such a language must be for a channel to convey the glad tidings of God's salvation to the poor, the weak, the sorrowful, and to people who cannot spend ten or twenty years in learning to comprehend the mysteries of the Chinese tongue. Who can imagine what would have been the fate of a divine revelation if the words of eternal life had been enswathed in such cerements as these? In the wisdom of God, the revelation of his will was given in the Hebrew tongue, with an alphabet of twenty-two letters, some of which, as inscribed on the Moabite stone, B. C. 900, are identical in form and sound with those now used in English books. This Hebrew alphabet, so simple that a child might learn it in a day, has never been lost or forgotten. The Hebrew language in which the Oracles of God were given to man, has never become a dead language. Since the day when the Law was given to Moses on Mou