highest gift of God to His Church merely made them rivals of the
linguist; it would rather seem that the Spirit of God, mingling with
the soul of man, supernaturally elevated its aspirations and glorified
its conceptions, so that an entranced state of ecstasy was
produced, and feelings called into energy, for the expression of which
the ordinary forms of speech were found inadequate. Even in a far
lower department, when a man becomes possessed of ideas for which his
ordinary vocabulary supplies no sufficient expression, his language
becomes broken, incoherent, struggling, and almost unnaturally
elevated; much more was it to be expected that when divine and new
feelings rushed like a flood upon the soul, the language of men would
have become strange and extraordinary; but in that supposed case, wild
as the expressions might appear to one coldly looking on and not
participating in the feelings of the speaker, they would be quite
sufficient to convey intelligible meaning to any one affected by the
same emotions.

Where perfect sympathy exists, incoherent utterance--a word--a
syllable--is quite as efficient as elaborate sentences. Now this is
precisely the account given of the phenomenon which attended the gift
of tongues. On the day of Pentecost, all who were in the same state of
spiritual emotion as those who spoke, understood the speakers; each
was as intelligible to all as if he spoke in their several tongues: to
those who were coolly and sceptically watching, the effects appeared
like those of intoxication. A similar account is given by the Apostle
Paul: the voice appeared to unsympathetic ears as that of a barbarian;
the uninitiated and unbelieving coming in, heard nothing that was
articulate to them, but only what seemed to them the ravings of
insanity.