In a second period, as in the Aryan and Semitic tongues, language is found advanced to a more systematic, grammatical development, and invites us to a more critical study and analysis of its forms. As yet there were neither abstract nor collective nouns, and every name designated a definite individual object. All these names of things had terminations suggestive of sex. Neuter nouns were yet unknown. Of course it was impossible for them to speak of any object, though inanimate, without ascribing to it something of an active, individual, sexual, personal character; and for this reason, if for no other, personification is a special characteristic of all languages in their earlier stages of development, and it is found to have a close correspondence with the mythical conceptions in the development of thought in those remote ages. There was then nothing prosaic in men’s thinking or speaking. Their language was a kind of unconscious poetry, every word a poem, every phrase embracing the germs of something metaphorical, or sparkling with the scintillations of some bright conceptions. Verbs, too, were strongly expressive of the mind’s various moods and emotions, and needed few auxiliaries that are employed in more abstract prose. Thus sunset was described as the sun growing old, decaying, dying; the sunrise as night giving birth to a brilliant, beautiful child. Spring was Sol greeting the happy earth with a warm embrace, and showering his treasures into the lap of nature. Rivers, fountains, grottoes, forests, mountains, rain, storm, the ocean, fire, thunder clouds and the heavenly bodies were all clothed with the attributes of living beings, and all descriptions of them were myths. Volumes have been written, and much more might here be said explanatory of the general subject, and to remove prejudice against mythological studies as useless or misleading in their tendency. Some well meaning persons ask how Christians who know the truth and rejoice in it can be either pleased or profited by communing with the thoughts or fancies of those on whom the sun did not shine, and who had none to lead them. It is important for all such to distinguish the point of view in which mythological narratives were contemplated by the ancients, by mythologists themselves, and that in which we are to regard them. To them they were in many respects realities closely connected with their national history and their religious faith. To us they are unreal, but affording evidence of the little nature taught them or that was acquired by merely intellectual processes, and their evident, but often vaguely felt, need of supernatural manifestations.