not low. It was childlike; and a child's heart is ever the true heart of man towards his God. To those men of the world's childhood recently preserved by Divine Providence from destruction in the flood, the rainbow, when once again seen spanning the earth and claiming it back, as it were, to light and beauty, became the bow of Divine promise, their help to religious faith. When the bow was in the cloud, they looked at it, and they knew that the storm was past, and no recurrence of the Deluge was to be apprehended. They expressed their own faith by saying, "God would see it and remember his covenant." The language is that of men ;—in strictness it humanizes the Great Spirit of all;-but the thought denotes man's faith in God, and by that faith God was truly honoured. Thousands of years have since passed by. The sun has shone and rain has fallen; and through the beautiful and wise uniformity of Nature's causes and effects, the same radiant but evanescent phenomenon has been presented to every one's eyes again and again;—to each eye observing at one moment, a different rainbow, and yet the same appearance;—to the same eye, moment after moment, a different rainbow, yet seeming to be the same, first growing in intensity of colour and then melting away; the continual repetition of the emblem, itself an instance of the promised uniformity of Nature, that "while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease. Till now, they never have ceased! "They continue unto this day according to His ordinance, because all things are His servants." If thus God's works are steadfast, what does this tell us of their Author? That He is everlasting; that He is faithful; that our trust in Him is secure. Though the waters of affliction should overwhelm us,-though deep call unto deep at the noise of his water-spouts, till all his waves and his billows have gone over us,—yet to the true Christian's heart there shines, in his faith in the goodness of his Heavenly Father, a halo of brightness above the dark cloud; and earnest voices speak from his heart's depth to give him comfort in the heavenly vision. "Look upon the rainbow," they say to him, in the language of the Jewish poet hailing its appearance in the natural sky, language emphasized and deepened in meaning by its application to the bow of promise in the heaven of God's moral government,-"Look upon that rainbow, and praise Him that made it. Very beautiful it is in the brightness thereof. It compasseth the heaven about with a glorious circle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it." (Ecclus. xliii. 11, 12.) BABEL; OR SPECULATIONS ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES. THE last remaining of the pre-patriarchal Pictures at the beginning of the book of Genesis, is that of the Tower of Babel. It is evidently a speculation on the origin of the diversity of human languages, containing the Jewish sacred theory of a fact which has exercised the minds of men in all ages. This theory, indeed, can hardly be regarded as very ingenious or plausible, when tried in the light of modern etymological and ethnological discoveries. Compared with the preceding sketches, the Picture of Babel possesses little interest, whether in an intellectual or a devotional point of view. Its theory of languages is not deeply thoughtful. There is little or no poetry in its conception. Its theology, too, is not simply puerile, but unamiable; as it makes God too much like Man in petty, paltry jealousy, as implied in the basis of the theory. The question of the origin of languages and the causes of their resemblances and diversities, has been in all ages a most inviting subject of speculation. Were all languages derived from one original stock? or from several originally separate sources? If from one, how have the existing diversities arisen? Old Herodotus, "the Father of History," gravely tells us of the following curious method having been devised and put in practice, as an experimentum crucis, by Psammitichus, king of Egypt: "Up to the reign of Psammitichus, the Egyptians had considered themselves the original stock of the human race. But ever since he took in hand the decision of the question, they have considered the Phrygians to be older than themselves, and themselves than all others. For Psammitichus, not being able to learn any other mode of discovering the original race, devised the following plan:-He gave two newly-born children, of parents taken at hazard, to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. No one was to utter a single word in their presence. They were to be put in a solitary hut by themselves, and the shepherd was to bring she-goats to them at proper intervals, and, having satisfied them with the milk, to await the result. Such was the plan, such the orders of Psammitichus, who wished to hear what language the children would utter first after the inarticulate whinings of infancy. And the result was as follows: When the shepherd had continued this method for a long time, as he opened the door and entered, both the children fell down and stretched their hands to him, crying Bekkos. When first the shepherd heard this, he kept his peace about it; but when the same word was frequently uttered as he went repeatedly to look after them, he told his sovereign, and brought the children by the king's order into his presence. And Psammitichus, on hearing them, inquired what nation use Bekkos as the name for anything, and found that the Phrygians call bread by that word. So the Egyptians, convinced by this experiment, yielded the claim of antiquity to the Phrygians." (Herodot. Euterpe, 2.) We may of course explain the above-recorded experiment more satisfactorily, as shewing that the children imitated the cry of the goats, B-e-k, B-e-k, than that they talked Phrygian intuitively. And we admire the simplicity of the honest old historian, that such a solution should not have occurred to him in detailing the wise king's experiment. Perhaps, indeed, he quietly laughed within himself at such philosophizing, and expected his readers to laugh too. But the story shews how intimately the question of the origin of languages is felt to be connected with that of the origin of the races or varieties of mankind. Psammitichus and Herodotus intuitively perceived this, and made the questions to be one and identical. If the Phrygian is the original language, the Phrygians are the original human stock. They assume this; and modern linguists and ethnologists sanction the assumption. If races were originally distinct, probably languages were .also. If all the existing races or varieties of mankind have grown or diverged from one stock, probably the languages have too. "The classification of languages," says Pickering, "is the classification of mankind." If the races, so various, can be referred to one original type, and their varieties be accounted for as mere divergencies, why may not all their languages also? Is there any greater diversity of speech than of feature, colour and character? If these can be traced to one original source, why not those? It is one and the same inquiry. In point of fact, modern ethnologists are increasingly disposed to trace all the human race to one primitive stock, and modern linguists to refer all languages to one parent language. So far modern philosophy seems to confirm the ancient tradition of this chapter of Genesis, that "the whole earth was of one language and of one speech" (xi. 1). But if we admit this philosophical opinion in favour of the original identity of languages, it is evidently unnecessary, on the same philosophical grounds, to look for any such solution of their existing varieties as that offered in the book of Genesis by the history of the Tower of Babel. If the philosopher believes he can deduce all the varieties of the human race from one primitive stock through natural causes, he is equally able to deduce the varieties of language from one original language, without having recourse to any theory of their miraculous confounding. The scriptural student must not accept his aid in the one matter and reject his arguments in the other; for the two questions are in fact one. Dr. Kitto, in his beautiful book of "Daily Readings" (in which, to a certain limited extent, he is very proud to reconcile these early records with modern philosophical discoveries), seems blind to this obvious consequence, and maintains that "it is impossible to account satisfactorily for the great and essential diversity of languages but by a miracle." He says, indeed, that "as the researches of the most learned philologers have appeared to shew that the languages of men may be traced to three principal roots, it is enough to suppose that the result (of the confusion of tongues) was the formation of two new languages, which, with that already existing, would give one to each of the families of Noah-thus constraining their separation, their dispersion, and the fulfilment of their destinies." But this philosophical idea of three root languages (though a favourite theory for a while) is already vanishing in their nearer identification, while it seems scarcely to answer the scriptural picture of the confusion of tongues at Babel. It is a middle theory, |