that some great men have presumed to limit to a verbal medium the communications of Him who is everywhere His own witness, and who still gives to His own holy oracles all their peculiar significance and authority? Some seem to think the Almighty has never given to men any notion of Himself, except by words. "Many ideas," says the celebrated Edmund Burke, "have never been at all presented to the senses of any men but by words, as God,[26] angels, devils, heaven, and hell, all of which have however a great influence over the passions."--On the Sublime and [the] Beautiful, p. 97. That God can never reveal facts or truths except by words, is a position with which I am by no means satisfied. Of the great truths of Christianity, Dr. Wayland, in his Elements of Moral Science, repeatedly avers, "All these being facts, can never be known, except by language, that is, by revelation."--First Edition, p. 132. Again: "All of them being of the nature of facts, they could be made known to man in no other way than by language."--Ib., p. 136. But it should be remembered, that these same facts were otherwise made known to the prophets; (1 Pet., i, 11;) and that which has been done, is not impossible, whether there is reason to expect it again or not. So of the Bible, Calvin says, "No man can have the least knowledge of true and sound doctrine, without having been a disciple of the Scripture."-- Institutes, B. i, Ch. 6. Had Adam, Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham, then, no such knowledge? And if such they had, what Scripture taught them? We ought to value the Scriptures too highly to say of them any thing that is unscriptural. I am, however, very far from supposing there is any other doctrine which can be safely substituted for the truths revealed of old, the truths contained in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments:
"Left only in those written records pure, Though not but by the Spirit understood." [27]--Milton.
CHAPTER V.
OF THE POWER OF LANGUAGE.
"Quis huic studio literarum, quod profitentur ii, qui grammatici vocantur, penitus se dedidit, quin omnem illarum artium pæne infinitam vim et materiam scientiæ cogitatione comprehenderit?"--CICERO. De Oratore, Lib. i, 3.
1. The peculiar power of language is another point worthy of particular consideration. The power of an instrument is virtually the power of him who wields it; and, as language is used in common, by the wise and the foolish, the mighty and the impotent, the candid and the crafty, the righteous and the wicked, it may perhaps seem to the reader a difficult matter, to speak intelligibly of its peculiar power. I mean, by this phrase, its fitness or efficiency to or for the accomplishment of the purposes for which it is used. As it is the nature of an agent, to be the doer of something, so it is the nature of an instrument, to be that with which something is effected. To make signs, is to do something, and, like all other actions, necessarily implies an agent; so all signs, being things by means of which other things are represented, are obviously the instruments of such representation. Words, then, which represent
