languages, instantaneously and without previous study, is as great as to receive the power to speak them. The anomaly in the miracle, merely to point out a suggestive discrepancy where all is anomalous, is that the gift of tongues should ever have been separated from the gift of interpretation. If a man understand the foreign language he speaks he can interpret it; if he cannot interpret it, he cannot understand it; and if he cannot understand it, can he possibly speak it? Certainly not, without his having been made a perfectly mechanical instrument through which, apart from the understanding and the will, sounds are involuntarily produced, which is not to be entertained. Still pursuing the same hypothesis,--the one gift is to speak languages which no one understands, the other to understand languages which no one speaks. Paul never even assumes the probability that the "tongue" spoken is understood by any one except the interpreter. The interpretation of such obscure tongues must have been a gift very little used,--never, indeed, except as the complement to the gift of tongues. The natural and useful facility in languages is apparently divided into two supernatural and useless halves. The idea is irresistibly suggested, as apparently it was to the Apostle himself, whether it would not have been more for the good of mankind and for the honour of Christianity, if, instead of these two miraculously incomplete gifts, a little natural good sense, five words even, to be spoken in the vernacular tongue and requiring no interpretation had been imparted. If, instead of foreign languages, we substitute the utterance of ecstatic religious excitement, the anomaly of speaking a language without understanding it or being understood becomes intelligible; and equally so the interpretation, {387} unaccompanied by the power of speaking. It is obvious in both cases that, as no one understands the tongue, no one can determine whether the interpretation of it be accurate or not. But it is easily conceivable that a sympathetic nervous listener might suppose that he understood the broken and incoherent speech of ecstasy and might interpret it according to his own stimulated imagination. The mysterious and unknown are suggestive texts, and there is nothing more infectious than religious excitement. In all this, however, is there anything miraculous?