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ligious belief, so far as it is an object of thought. The prevalent mode of viewing the world will make itself felt both in language and in religion. It is, for example, to take the simplest of all instances, a point of vast moment in the construction of a popular religious faith whether in the language of the people persons and things are alike distinguished by sex-terminations, or are separated from the first into distinct classes. In the one case there is the possibility of the personification of natural powers from which flow almost necessarily the rich imaginations of mythology. In the other case the possibility is excluded.

The effect of the absence or presence of this capacity and tendency to personify external objects is seen both in the general form of religious belief, and specially in the names given to the unseen powers. Two great types of the worship of the African races are determined by this difference. The worship of the Kafirs, Negroes and Polynesians, who have no distinction of sex in nouns, is a worship of ancestors, the personal beings whom they can realise through memory; the worship of the Hottentots and North African races is based on the personification of the heavenly bodies sug

gested by their sex-denoting languages'. So again in Chinese there are no genders and there is no indigenous mythology.

Again, when men give names to the unseen forms by which they believe that they surrounded they may seek them either from what they observe in human action or from the phenomena of the outer world. The Shemitic and Aryan religions are distinguished by this fundamental difference of view. The Divine names which are proper to the Shemitic languages are predicative and moral, drawn from the relations of human society: the names which are proper to the Aryan languages are physical and concrete. But here it is evident that the language does not mould the fashion of the thought but simply reveals it. The idea of the Divine power is realised in the one case under the image of a moral relation and in the other under a physical image. We can say no more than that both modes of representing the

1 Dr Bleek, Comparative Grammar of the South African Languages, Preface, quoted by Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion pp. 40 f.; and compare for the whole subject Max Müller's Essay in his 'Chips' ii. pp. 1–146.

2 The Chinese represent both conceptions. Of the two names which they apply to the highest spiritual powers the one expresses the thought of physical vastness with an unalterable simplicity and (it may be said) incompleteness, (Tien) and the other that of supreme sovereignty (Ti, Shang Tî.)

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Connexion of forms of language

ultimate fact are essentially human, and necessary for its complete expression. An absolute religion will in some way recognise both.

If we go a step further in the development of language, and proceed from the mere giving of names to the formation of words we shall find that the structural differences of languages-which answer to specialities of national character-exert a direct influence upon the growth of religious beliefs. Our example shall be taken again from a comparison of the Shemitic and Aryan languages.

In the Shemitic languages the root, the fundamental element of the word, stands out with ineffaceable distinctness: in the Aryan languages the root is often covered up in formative elements. This great law extends even to a secondary stage. In Hebrew, for example, with one or two doubtful exceptions there are absolutely no compound words: in Greek and German, to take the most familiar examples, the power and richness of the language depends in a great measure upon the limitless variety of compounds. In the former case therefore the original meaning of the root so to speak shines through the dress in which it is clothed, and the resultant word always points back to its source. In the latter case, the derivatives often become names which have lost their signi

with types of religious belief.

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ficance, and which call up none of their first associations. In the Shemitic dialects the terms for the heaven or the dawn could not put off their direct physical meaning. The personal interpretation of the phenomena of nature was thus impossible. With the Aryan languages it was otherwise. The meaning of Eos or Hecate, of Jupiter or Mars was forgotten; and the manifestations of one unknown Power were made separate personalities. The general conclusion from these facts has been well summed up in a single sentence: "The language of the Shemitic races was theological: the language of the Aryan races was mythological” (Max Müller).

This difference carried with it far-reaching consequences. In the one case there was, if not the tendency, at least the power to concentrate the different ideas of majesty and lordship on One Sovereign: in the other case there was the tendency to define and isolate the separate representations of forces regarded in their outward manifestations.

But while we recognise the part which language has played and still plays in giving form to popular religious notions, we must be careful not to exaggerate this influence. The language does not itself create or finally explain the religion.

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Languages reveal and do not

It simply illustrates the impulses and tendencies which found expression in the religion under the intellectual form; but the impulses and tendencies themselves underlie religion and language alike. We have not reached the end when we can see that particular languages offered facilities for the formation and propagation of special religious ideas. The original question still remains: How came the languages to have these peculiar developments? And the answer remains hidden in the ultimate mystery of life. Language reveals the deepest springs of thought, and of religious thought as of all other thought, but it does create them. Each particular language reveals, or has the tendency to reveal, just so much of the Truth as the race is endowed with as a constituent of humanity. Man is born to worship just as he is born to speak he is born religious just as he is born social. In the ordering of outward life he finds expression for the one part of his nature: in the embodiment of faith he finds expression for the other. The consciousness of the three fundamental existences-self, the world, GOD-carries with it necessarily the desire to reconcile them. That this is so is an ultimate fact of experience.

To go back then to the point from which we digressed, we are justified in looking to history