satisfactory judgment of it, it will be well for us to consider a
little in detail two classes of difficulties. 1. Those which
belong to the Revelation itself, arising from the limitations to
which it was necessarily subject in its delivery. 2. Those which
arise from our imperfect knowledge of the language in which it is
written, and from our inability to place ourselves in the
intellectual position of those to whom it was originally given.

1. When this record was committed to writing, language was in a
very different condition from that in which it is now. We have an
account of the first recorded exercise of the faculty of speech in
Gen. ii. 19. Adam first used it to give names to all the living
creatures as they passed in review before him. In accordance with
this statement it appears, from the researches of philologists,
that language in its earliest state was entirely, or almost
entirely limited to words denoting sensible objects and actions.
It seems probable that these names were derived from radicals
expressing general ideas [Footnote: Max Muller's Lectures on the
Science of Language, First Series Lect. viii. ix.]; but there is
reason to doubt whether these radicals ever had a formal existence
as words--they seem rather to have been the mental stock out of
which words were produced. But the human mind had from the first
powers for the exercise of which this limited vocabulary was
insufficient. Even in the outer world there was much which was the
object of reason and inference rather than of sense, while the
whole world of consciousness was entirely unprovided with the
means of expression. To meet this difficulty words, which
originally denoted objects of sense, were used figuratively to
express ideas which bore some resemblance or analogy, real or
fancied, to their original significance. As time passed on this