The clear, cheerful, world-enjoying temper of the Greek embodies itself in the first; he could desire nothing better or higher for himself, nor wish it for his friend, than to have _joy_ in his life. But the Hebrew had a deeper longing within him, and one which finds utterance in his "Peace." It is not hard to perceive why this latter people should have been chosen as the first bearers of that truth which indeed enables truly to _rejoice_, but only through first bringing _peace_; nor why from them the word of life should first go forth. It may be urged, indeed, that these were only forms, and such they may have at length become; as in our "good-by" or "adieu" we can hardly be said now to commit our friend to the Divine protection; yet still they were not forms at the beginning, nor would they have held their ground, if ever they had become such altogether.
How much, again, will be sometimes involved in the gradual disuse of one name, and the coming up of another in its room. Thus, little as the fact, and the moral significance of the fact, may have been noticed at the time, what an epoch was it in the history of the Papacy, and with what distinctness marking a more thorough secularizing of its whole tone and spirit, when "_Ecclesia_ Romana," the official t.i.tle by which it was wont at an earlier day to designate itself, gave place to the later t.i.tle, "_Curia_ Romana," the Roman _Church_ making room for the Roman _Court_. [Footnote: See on this matter _The Pope and the Council_, by Ja.n.u.s, p. 215.] The modifications of meaning which a word has undergone as it had been transplanted from one soil to another, so that one nation borrowing it from another, has brought into it some force foreign to it before, has deepened, or extenuated, or otherwise modified its meaning,--this may reveal to us, as perhaps nothing else would, fundamental diversities of character existing between them. The word in Greek exactly corresponding to our "self-sufficient" is one of honour, and was applied to men in their praise. And indeed it was the glory of the heathen philosophy to teach man to find his resources in his own bosom, to be thus sufficient for himself; and seeing that a true centre without him and above him, a centre in G.o.d, had not been revealed to him, it was no shame for him to seek it there; far better this than to have no centre at all. But the Gospel has taught us another lesson, to find our sufficiency in G.o.d: and thus "self- sufficient," to the Greek suggesting no lack of modesty, of humility, or of any good thing, at once suggests such to us. "Self-sufficiency"
no man desires now to be attributed to him. The word carries for us its own condemnation; and its different uses, for honour once, for reproach now, do in fact ground themselves on the innermost differences between the religious condition of the world before Christ and after.
It was not well with Italy, she might fill the world with exquisite specimens of her skill in the arts, with pictures and statues of rarest loveliness, but all higher national life was wanting to her during those centuries in which she degraded "virtuoso," or the virtuous man, to signify one skilled in the appreciation of painting, music, and sculpture; for these, the ornamental fringe of a people"s life, can never, without loss of all manliness of character, be its main texture and woof--not to say that excellence in them has been too often dissociated from all true virtue and moral worth. The opposite exaggeration of the Romans, for whom "virtus" meant predominantly warlike courage, the truest "manliness" of men, was more tolerable than this; for there is a sense in which a man"s "valour" is his value, is the measure of his worth; seeing that no virtue can exist among men who have not learned, in Milton"s glorious phrase," to hate the cowardice of doing wrong." [Footnote: It did not escape Plutarch, imperfect Latin scholar as he was, that "virtus" far more nearly corresponded to [Greek: andreia] than to [Greek: arete] (_Coriol. I_)] It could not but be morally ill with a people among whom "morbidezza" was used as an epithet of praise, expressive of a beauty which on the score of its sickly softness demanded to be admired. There was too sure a witness here for the decay of moral strength and health, when these could not merely be dissevered from beauty, but implicitly put in opposition to it. Nor less must it have fared ill with Italians, there was little joy and little pride which they could have felt in their country, at a time when "pellegrino," meaning properly the strange or the foreign, came to be of itself a word of praise, and equivalent to beautiful. [Footnote: Compare Florio"s Ital. Diet.: "pelegrino, excellent, n.o.ble, rare, pregnant, singular and choice."] Far better the pride and a.s.sumption of that ancient people who called all things and persons beyond their own pale barbarous and barbarians; far better our own "outlandish,"
used with something of the same contempt. There may be a certain intolerance in our use of these; yet this how much healthier than so far to have fallen out of conceit with one"s own country, so far to affect things foreign, that these last, merely on the strength of being foreign, commend themselves as beautiful in our sight. How little, again, the Italians, until quite later years, can have lived in the spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverenced the most ill.u.s.trious among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured so far to degrade the name of one among their n.o.blest, that every glib and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture- galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called "cicerone," or a Cicero! It is unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are not again, or are not easily again, got rid of. They remain, testifying to an ign.o.ble past, and in some sort helping to maintain it, long after the temper and tone of mind that produced them has pa.s.sed away. [Footnote: See on this matter Marsh, _On the English Language_, New York, 1860, p.
224.]
Happily it is nearly impossible for us in England to understand the mingled scorn, hatred, fear, suspicion, contempt, which in time past were a.s.sociated with the word "sbirri" in Italian. [Footnote: [Compare V. Hugo"s allusion to Louis Napoleon in the _Chatiments_:
"Qui pour la mettre en croix livra, _Sbire_ cruel!
Rome republicaine a Rome catholique!"]]
These "sbirri" were the humble, but with all this the acknowledged, ministers of justice; while yet everything which is mean and false and oppressive, which can make the name of justice hateful, was implied in this t.i.tle of theirs, was a.s.sociated with their name. There is no surer sign of a bad oppressive rule, than when the t.i.tles of the administrators of law, t.i.tles which should be in themselves so honourable, thus acquire a hateful undermeaning. What a world of concussions, chicane and fraud, must have found place, before tax- gatherer, or exciseman, "publican," as in our English Bible, could become a word steeped in hatred and scorn, as alike for Greek and Jew it was; while, on the other hand, however unwelcome the visits of the one or the interference of the other may be to us, yet the sense of the entire fairness and justice with which their exactions are made, acquits these names for us of the slightest sense of dishonour.
"Policeman" has no evil subaudition with us; though in the last century, when a Jonathan Wild was possible, "catchpole," a word in Wiclif"s time of no dishonour at all, was abundantly tinged with this scorn and contempt. So too, if at this day any accidental profits fall or "escheat" to the Crown, they are levied with so much fairness and more than fairness to the subject, that, were not the thing already accomplished, "escheat" would never yield "cheat," nor "escheator"
"cheater," as through the extortions and injustices for which these dues were formerly a pretext, they actually have done.
It is worse, as marking that a still holier sanctuary than that of civil government has become profane in men"s sight, when words which express sacred functions and offices become redolent of scorn. How thankful we may be that in England we have no equivalent to the German "Pfaffe," which, identical with "papa" and "pope," and a name given at first to any priest, now carries with it the insinuation of almost every unworthiness in the forms of meanness, servility, and avarice which can render the priest"s office and person base and contemptible.
Much may be learned by noting the words which nations have been obliged to borrow from other nations, as not having the same of home-growth-- this in most cases, if not in all, testifying that the thing itself was not native, but an exotic, transplanted, like the word that indicated it, from a foreign soil. Thus it is singularly characteristic of the social and political life of England, as distinguished from that of the other European nations, that to it alone the word "club" belongs; France and Germany, having been alike unable to grow a word of their own, have borrowed ours. That England should have been the birthplace of "club" is nothing wonderful; for these voluntary a.s.sociations of men for the furthering of such social or political ends as are near to the hearts of the a.s.sociates could have only had their rise under such favourable circ.u.mstances as ours. In no country where there was not extreme personal freedom could they have sprung up; and as little in any where men did not know how to use this freedom with moderation and self-restraint, could they long have been endured. It was comparatively easy to adopt the word; but the ill success of the "club" itself everywhere save here where it is native, has shown that it was not so easy to transplant or, having transplanted, to acclimatize the thing.
While we have lent this and other words, political and industrial for the most part, to the French and Germans, it would not be less instructive, if time allowed, to trace our corresponding obligations to them.
And scarcely less significant and instructive than the presence of a word in a language, will be occasionally its absence. Thus Fronto, a Greek orator in Roman times, finds evidence of an absence of strong family affection on the part of the Romans in the absence of any word in the Latin language corresponding to the Greek [Greek: philostorgos]
How curious, from the same point of view, are the conclusions which Cicero in his high Roman fashion draws from the absence of any word in the Greek answering to the Latin "ineptus"; not from this concluding, as we might have antic.i.p.ated, that the character designated by the word was wanting, but rather that the fault was so common, so universal with the Greeks, that they failed to recognize it as a fault at all.
[Footnote: _De Orat_. ii. 4: Quem enim nos _ineptum_ vocamus, is mihi videtur ab hoc nomen habere ductum, quod non sit aptus. Idque in sermonis nostri consuetudine perlate patet. Nam qui aut tempus quid postulet, non videt, aut plura loquitur, aut se ostentat, aut eorum quibusc.u.m est vel dignitatis vel commodi rationem non habet, aut denique in aliquo genere aut inconcinnus aut multus est, is ineptus esse dicitur. Hoc vitio c.u.mulata est eruditissima illa Graecorum natio.
Itaque quod vim hujus mali Graeci non vident, ne nomen quidem ei vitio imposuerunt. Ut enim quasras omnia, quomodo Graeci ineptum appellent, non invenies.] Very instructive you may find it to note these words, which one people possess, but to which others have nothing to correspond, so that they have no choice but to borrow these, or else to go without altogether. Here are some French words for which it would not be easy, nay, in most cases it would be impossible, to find exact equivalents in English or in German, or probably in any language: "aplomb," "badinage," "borne," "chic," "chicane," "cossu," "coterie,"
"egarement," "elan," "espieglerie," "etourderie," "friponnerie,"
"gentil," "ingenue," "liaison," "malice," "parvenu," "persiflage,"
"prevenant," "ruse," "tournure," "traca.s.serie," "verve." It is evident that the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and subtle as in many instances are the thoughts which these words embody, there are deeper thoughts struggling in the bosom of a people, who have devised for themselves such words as the following: "gemuth,"
"heimweh," "innigkeit," "sehnsucht," "tiefsinn," "sittsamkeit,"
"verhangniss," "weltschmerz," "zucht"; all these being German words which, in a similar manner, partially or wholly fail to find their equivalents in French.
The petty spite which unhappily so often reigns between nations dwelling side by side with one another, as it embodies itself in many shapes, so it finds vent in the words which they borrow from one another, and the use to which they put them. Thus the French, borrowing "hablar" from the Spaniards, with whom it means simply to speak, give it in "habler" the sense of to brag; the Spaniards paying them off in exactly their own coin, for of "parler" which in like manner is but to speak in French, they make "parlar," which means to prate, to chat.
[Footnote: See Darmesteter, _The Life of Words_, Eng. ed. p. 100.]
But it is time to bring this lecture to an end. These ill.u.s.trations, to which it would be easy to add more, justify all that has been a.s.serted of a moral element existing in words; so that they do not hold themselves neutral in that great conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, which is dividing the world; that they are not satisfied to be pa.s.sionless vehicles, now of the truth, and now of lies. We see, on the contrary, that they continually take their side, are some of them children of light, others children of this world, or even of darkness; they beat with the pulses of our life; they stir with our pa.s.sions; we clothe them with light; we steep them in scorn; they receive from us the impressions of our good and of our evil, which again they are most active still further to propagate and diffuse.
[Footnote: Two or three examples of what we have been affirming, drawn from the Latin, may fitly here find place. Thus Cicero (_Tusc_. iii. 7) laments of "confidens" that it should have acquired an evil signification, and come to mean bold, over-confident in oneself, unduly pushing (compare Virgil,_Georg_. iv. 444), a meaning which little by little had been superinduced on the word, but etymologically was not inherent in it at all. In the same way "latro," having left two earlier meanings behind, one of these current so late as in Virgil (_Aen_. xii.
7), settles down at last in the meaning of robber. Not otherwise "facinus" begins with being simply a fact or act, something done; but ends with being some act of outrageous wickedness. "p.r.o.nuba" starts with meaning a bridesmaid it ign.o.bly ends with suggesting a procuress.]
Must we not own then that there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of which we may hitherto have taken too little account, around us and about us? Is there not something very solemn and very awful in wielding such an instrument as this of language is, with such power to wound or to heal, to kill or to make alive? and may not a deeper meaning than hitherto we have attached to it, lie in that saying, "By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned"?
LECTURE IV.
ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS.
Language, being ever in flux and flow, and, for nations to which letters are still strange, existing only for the ear and as a sound, we might beforehand expect would prove the least trustworthy of all vehicles whereby the knowledge of the past has reached our present; that one which would most certainly betray its charge. In actual fact it has not proved so at all. It is the main, oftentimes the only, connecting link between the two, an ark riding above the water-floods that have swept away or submerged every other landmark and memorial of bygone ages and vanished generations of men. Far beyond all written records in a language, the language itself stretches back, and offers itself for our investigation--"the pedigree of nations," as Johnson calls it [Footnote: This statement of his must be taken with a certain amount of qualification. It is not always that races are true to the end to their language; external forces are sometimes too strong. Thus Celtic disappeared before Latin in Gaul and Spain. Slavonic became extinct in Prussia two centuries ago, German taking its room; the negroes of Hayti speak French, and various American tribes have exchanged their own idioms for Spanish and Portuguese. See upon this matter Sayce"s _Principles of Comparative Philology_, pp. 175-181.]-- itself in its own independent existence a far older and at the same time a far more instructive doc.u.ment than any book, inscription, or other writing which employs it. The written records may have been falsified by carelessness, by vanity, by fraud, by a mult.i.tude of causes; but language never deceives, if only we know how to question it aright.
Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting inquiries, which by the aid of any tolerable dictionary you may carry on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary, succeeding one another, which he meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the successive physical changes through which a region has pa.s.sed; is, so to say, in a condition to preside at those past changes, to measure the forces that were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their date. Now with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed upon it, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely a.n.a.logous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Low German, Danish, Norman words, and then once more Latin and French, with slighter intrusions from many other quarters: and any one with skill to a.n.a.lyse the language might, up to a certain point, re-create for himself the history of the people speaking that language, might with tolerable accuracy appreciate the diverse elements out of which that people was made up, in what proportion these were mingled, and in what succession they followed, one upon the other.
Would he trace, for example, the relation in which the English and Norman occupants of this land stood to one another? An account of this, in the main as accurate as it would be certainly instructive, might be drawn from an intelligent study of the contributions which they have severally made to the English language, as bequeathed to us jointly by them both. Supposing all other records to have perished, we might still work out and almost reconstruct the history by these aids; even as now, when so many doc.u.ments, so many inst.i.tutions survive, this must still be accounted the most important, and that of which the study will introduce us, as no other can, into the innermost heart and life of large periods of our history.
Nor, indeed, is it hard to see why the language must contain such instruction as this, when we a little realize to ourselves the stages by which it has reached us in its present shape. There was a time when the languages which the English and the Norman severally spoke, existed each by the side of, but un-mingled with, the other; one, that of the small dominant cla.s.s, the other that of the great body of the people.
By degrees, however, with the reconciliation and partial fusion of the two races, the two languages effected a transaction; one indeed prevailed over the other, but at the same time received a mult.i.tude of the words of that other into its own bosom. At once there would exist duplicates for many things. But as in popular speech two words will not long exist side by side to designate the same thing, it became a question how the relative claims of the English and Norman word should adjust themselves, which should remain, which should be dropped; or, if not dropped, should be transferred to some other object, or express some other relation. It is not of course meant that this was ever formally proposed, or as something to be settled by agreement; but practically one was to be taken and one left. Which was it that should maintain its ground? Evidently, where a word was often on the lips of one race, its equivalent seldom on those of the other, where it intimately cohered with the whole manner of life of one, was only remotely in contact with that of the other, where it laid strong hold on one, and only slight on the other, the issue could not be doubtful.
In several cases the matter was simpler still: it was not that one word expelled the other, or that rival claims had to be adjusted; but that there never had existed more than one word, the thing which that word noted having been quite strange to the other section of the nation.
Here is the explanation of the a.s.sertion made just now--namely, that we might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an a.n.a.lysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it.
Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception (to be adduced presently), descend to us from them--"sovereign," "sceptre," "throne,"
"realm," "royalty," "homage," "prince," "duke," "count," ("earl" indeed is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his "countess" from the Norman), "chancellor," "treasurer," "palace," "castle," "dome," and a mult.i.tude more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of "king" would make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new t.i.tle, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time to a.s.sert itself anew.
And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment, are Norman throughout; with the broad basis of the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire; the divisions of time; three out of the four seasons, spring, summer, and winter; the features of natural scenery, the words used in earliest childhood, the simpler emotions of the mind; all the prime social relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister,--these are of native growth and un-borrowed. "Palace" and "castle" may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe far dearer names, the "house," the "roof," the "home," the "hearth."
His "board" too, and often probably it was no more, has a more hospitable sound than the "table" of his lord. His st.u.r.dy arms turn the soil; he is the "boor," the "hind," the "churl"; or if his Norman master has a name for him, it is one which on his lips becomes more and more a t.i.tle of opprobrium and contempt, the "villain." The instruments used in cultivating the earth, the "plough," the "share," the "rake,"
the "scythe," the "harrow," the "wain," the "sickle," the "spade," the "sheaf," the "barn," are expressed in his language; so too the main products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats, bere, gra.s.s, flax, hay, straw, weeds; and no less the names of domestic animals. You will remember, no doubt, how in the matter of these Wamba, the Saxon jester in _Ivanhoe_, plays the philologer, [Footnote: Wallis, in his _Grammar_, p. 20, had done so before.] having noted that the names of almost all animals, so long as they are alive, are Saxon, but when dressed and prepared for food become Norman--a fact, he would intimate, not very wonderful; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and feeding them, but only that they might appear on the table of his Norman lord. Thus "ox," "steer," "cow," are Saxon, but "beef" Norman; "calf" is Saxon, but "veal" Norman; "sheep" is Saxon, but "mutton"
Norman: so it is severally with "swine" and "pork," "deer" and "venison," "fowl" and "pullet." "Bacon," the only flesh which perhaps ever came within the hind"s reach, is the single exception. Putting all this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been indicated here, we should certainly gather, that while there are manifest tokens preserved in our language of the Saxon having been for a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of English life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after language; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic records, and the present social condition of England, consent in bearing witness.
Then again, who could doubt, even if the fact were not historically attested, that the Arabs were the arithmeticians, the astronomers, the chemists, the merchants of the Middle Ages, when he had once noted that from them we have gotten these words and so many others like them- "alchemy," "alcohol," "alembic," "algebra," "alkali," "almanack,"
"azimuth," "cypher," "elixir," "magazine," "nadir," "tariff," "zenith,"
"zero "?--for if one or two of these were originally Greek, they reached us through the Arabic, and with tokens of their transit cleaving to them. In like manner, even though history were silent on the matter, we might conclude, and we know that we should rightly conclude, that the origins of the monastic system are to be sought in the Greek and not in the Latin branch of the Church, seeing that with hardly an exception the words expressing the const.i.tuent elements of the system, as "anchorite," "archimandrite," "ascetic," "cen.o.bite,"
"hermit," "monastery," "monk," are Greek and not Latin.
But the study of words will throw rays of light upon a past infinitely more remote than any which I have suggested here, will reveal to us secrets of the past, which else must have been lost to us for ever.
Thus it must be a question of profound interest for as many as count the study of man to be far above every other study, to ascertain what point of culture that Indo-European race of which we come, the _stirps generosa et historica_ of the world, as Coleridge has called it, had attained, while it was dwelling still as one family in its common home.
No voices of history, the very faintest voices of tradition, reach us from ages so far removed from our own. But in the silence of all other voices there is one voice which makes itself heard, and which can tell us much. Where Indian, and Greek, and Latin, and Teutonic designate some object by the same word, and where it can be clearly shown that they did not, at a later day, borrow that word one from the other, the object, we may confidently conclude, must have been familiar to the Indo-European race, while yet these several groups of it dwelt as one undivided family together. Now they have such common words for the chief domestic animals--for ox, for sheep, for horse, for dog, for goose, and for many more. From this we have a right to gather that before the migrations began, they had overlived and outgrown the fishing and hunting stages of existence, and entered on the pastoral.
They have _not_ all the same words for the main products of the earth, as for corn, wheat, barley, wine; it is tolerably evident therefore that they had not entered on the agricultural stage. So too from the absence of names in common for the princ.i.p.al metals, we have a right to argue that they had not arrived at a knowledge of the working of these.
On the other hand, identical names for dress, for house, for door, for garden, for numbers as far as a hundred, for the primary relations of the family, as father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, for the G.o.dhead, testify that the common stock, intellectual and moral, was not small which they severally took with them when they went their way, each to set up for itself and work out its own destinies in its own appointed region of the earth. [Footnote: See Brugmann, _Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen_ (1886), Section 2.] This common stock may, indeed, have been much larger than these investigations declare; for a word, once common to all these languages, may have survived only in one; or possibly may have perished in all.
Larger it may very well, but poorer it cannot, have been. [Footnote: Ozanam (_Les Germains avant le Christianisme_, p. 155): Dans le vocabulaire d"une langue on a tout le spectacle d"une civilisation. On y voit ce qu"un peuple sait des choses invisibles, si les notions de Dieu, de l"ame, du devoir, sont a.s.sez pures chez lui pour ne souffrir que des termes exacts. On mesure la puissance de ses inst.i.tutions par le nombre et la propriete des termes qu"elles veulent pour leur service; la liturgie a ses paroles sacramentelles, la procedure a ses formules. Enfin, si ce peuple a etudie la nature, il faut voir a quel point il en a penetre les secrets, par quelle variete d"expressions, par quels sons flatteurs ou energiques, il a cherche a decrire les divers aspects du ciel et de la terre, a faire, pour ainsi dire, l"inventaire des richesses temporelles dont il dispose.]
This is one way in which words, by their presence or their absence, may teach us history which else we now can never know. I pa.s.s to other ways.
There are vast harvests of historic lore garnered often in single words; important facts which they at once proclaim and preserve; these too such as sometimes have survived nowhere else but in them. How much history lies in the word "church." I see no sufficient reason to dissent from those who derive it from the Greek [Greek: kyriakae], "that which pertains to the Lord," or "the house which is the Lord"s."
It is true that a difficulty meets us at the threshold here. How explain the presence of a Greek word in the vocabulary of our Teutonic forefathers? for that _we_ do not derive it immediately from the Greek, is certain. What contact, direct or indirect, between the languages will account for this? The explanation is curious. While Angles, Saxons, and other tribes of the Teutonic stock were almost universally converted through contact with the Latin Church in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, or by its missionaries, some Goths on the Lower Danube had been brought at an earlier date to the knowledge of Christ by Greek missionaries from Constantinople; and this [Greek: kyriakae] or "church," did, with certain other words, pa.s.s over from the Greek to the Gothic tongue; these Goths, the first converted and the first therefore with a Christian vocabulary, lending the word in their turn to the other German tribes, to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers among the rest; and by this circuit it has come round from Constantinople to us. [Footnote: The pa.s.sage most ill.u.s.trative of the parentage of the word is from Walafrid Strabo (about A.D. 840): Ab ipsis autem Graecis Kyrch a Kyrios, et alia multa accepimus. Sicut domus Dei Basilica, i.e. Regia a Rege, sic etiam Kyrica, i.e. Dominica a Domino, nuncupatur. Si autem quaeritur, qua occasione ad nos vestigia haec graecitatis advenerint, dicendum praecipue a Gothis, qui et Getae, c.u.m eo tempore, quo ad fidem Christi perducti sunt, in Graecorum provinciis commorantes, nostrum, i.e. theotisc.u.m sermonem habuerint. Cf.
Rudolf von Raumer, _Einwirkung des Christenthums auf die Althochdeutsche Sprache_, p. 288; Niedner, _Kirch. Geschichte_, p. 2.
[It may, however, be as well to remark that no trace of the Greek [Greek: kyriakae] occurs in the literary remains of the Gothic language which have come down to us; the Gothic Christians borrowed [Greek: ekklaesia], as the Latin and Celtic Christians did.]]
Or again, interrogate "pagan" and "paganism," and you will find important history in them. You are aware that "pagani," derived from "pagus," a village, had at first no religious significance, but designated the dwellers in hamlets and villages as distinguished from the inhabitants of towns and cities. It was, indeed, often applied to _all_ civilians as contradistinguished from the military caste; and this fact may have had a certain influence, when the idea of the faithful as soldiers of Christ was strongly realized in the minds of men. But it was mainly in the following way that it grew to be a name for those alien from the faith of Christ. The Church fixed itself first in the seats and centres of intelligence, in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire; in them its earliest triumphs were won; while, long after these had accepted the truth, heathen superst.i.tions and idolatries lingered on in the obscure hamlets and villages; so that "pagans" or villagers, came to be applied to _all_ the remaining votaries of the old and decayed superst.i.tions, although not all, but only most of them, were such. In an edict of the Emperor Valentinian, of date A.D. 368, "pagan" first a.s.sumes this secondary meaning.
"Heathen" has run a course curiously similar. When the Christian faith first found its way into Germany, it was the wild dwellers on the _heaths_ who were the slowest to accept it, the last probably whom it reached. One hardly expects an etymology in _Piers Plowman_; but this is there:
"_Hethene_ is to mene after _heth_, And untiled erthe."
B. 15, 451, Skeat"s ed. (Clarendon Press).
Here, then, are two instructive notices--one, the historic fact that the Church of Christ planted itself first in the haunts of learning and intelligence; another, morally more significant, that it did not shun discussion, feared not to encounter the wit and wisdom of this world, or to expose its claims to the searching examination of educated men; but, on the contrary, had its claims first recognized by them, and in the great cities of the world won first a complete triumph over all opposing powers. [Footnote: There is a good note on "pagan" in Gibbon"s _Decline and Fall_, c. 21, at the end; and in Grimm"s _Deutsche Mythol_.
p. 1198; and the history of the changes in the word"s use is well traced in another interest by Mill, _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 271.]
I quoted in my first lecture the saying of one who, magnifying the advantage to be derived from such studies as ours, did not fear to affirm that oftentimes more might be learned from the history of a word than from the history of a campaign. Thus follow some Latin word,.
"imperator" for example; as Dean Merivale has followed it in his _History of the Romans_, [Footnote: Vol. iii. pp. 441-452.] and you will own as much. But there is no need to look abroad. Words of our own out of number, such as "barbarous," "benefice," "clerk," "common-sense,"
"romance," "sacrament," "sophist," [Footnote: For a history of "sophist" see Sir Alexander Grant"s _Ethics of Aristotle_, 2nd ed. vol.