intellectual, should vainly search, like the brutes, its _instrument_ of morality and knowledge, without power to find it only after myriads of generations. Humanity deaf and mute during a hundred thousand years! I shudder at the blasphemy of believing such a mystery. I love better to believe in the other; that is to say, in the fatherly mystery of the Creator himself, inspiring on the lips of his infant creature, speech; the word, the sentence, the inborn expression, which at sight gave things names appropriate to their form and nature.” And when we consider how necessary the use of language is to the convenience, comfort, and progress of man, and that man had at once conferred upon him a body “curiously and wonderfully made,” and a mind capacious, active, strong, and penetrating, can we harbor the idea that after his creation, God left him,--a perfect, full-grown being, the noblest of his works, and the lord of nature,--without speech? Rather must we not infer, with a distinguished writer, that “the same Divine Author of the physical organs of speech imparted to man the knowledge of their use and power”? But speech carries thought from the mouth to the ear by sound, and then perishes like the medium which conveyed it there. There needed to be, therefore, a process to _preserve_ thought, by reducing it to material signs on some enduring substance. So writing was given to the world. And the wonderful discovery of alphabetical writing, how did it come about? By chance? by human ingenuity? or through the “fatherly mystery of the Creator inspiring it” in man? Says the learned Shackford, “That men should immediately fall on such a project, to express sounds by letters, and expose to sight all that may be said or thought in about twenty characters variously placed, exceeds the highest notions we can have of the capacities with which we are endowed.” How difficult to submit our reason to the theories which have been argued of a _gradual_ construction of alphabetical letters! Is it reasonable to suppose, for example, that the old Shemitish letter D was suggested by the word _door_, or the letter H by the word _fence_, and the V by a _hook_ or _nail_? Do we not find evidence, that alphabetical writing was divinely revealed, in the tables of stone written by the finger of God and given to Moses on the Mount? In those ten commandments so anciently bestowed, all the Hebrew letters, with one exception, are found--every guttural, labial, lingual, and dental is disclosed. Some quote the Chinese as leading the way in imprinting language. But their writing was hieroglyphical, they did not reach alphabetical writing, and they use one hundred and twenty thousand characters to express thought.