' He there shows that the utmost
that can fairly be asked is, to prove that the affirmed truths involve
no necessary contradiction.
____
We have little doubt in our own minds that the ultimately converging
though, it may be, transiently discrepant conclusions of the sciences of
philology, ethnology, and geology (in all of which we may rest assured
great discoveries are yet to be made) will tend to harmonise with the
ultimate results of a more thorough study of the records of the race as
contained in the book of Revelation. Let us be permitted to imagine
one example of such possible harmony. We think that the philologist may
engage to make out, on the strictest principles of induction, from the
tenacity with which all communities cling to their language, and the
slow observed rate of change by which they alter; by which Anglo-Saxon,
for example has become English*, Latin Italian, and ancient Greek modern
(though these languages have been affected by every conceivable cause of
variation and depravation); that it would require hundreds of thousands,
nay millions, of years to account for the production, by known natural
causes, of the vast multitude of totally distinct languages, and tens
of thousands of dialects, which man now utters.
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