where they are ruling, as men ought to rule, over nature, and
compelling her to give up her secrets to them, where new thoughts are
rising up over the horizon of a nation's mind, new feelings are
stirring at a nation's heart, new facts coming within the sphere of its
knowledge, there will language be growing and advancing too. It cannot
lag behind; for man feels that nothing is properly his own, that he has
not secured any new thought, or entered upon any new spiritual
inheritance, till he has fixed it in language, till he can contemplate
it, not as himself, but as his word; he is conscious that he must
express truth, if he is to preserve it, and still more if he would
propagate it among others. 'Names,' as it has been excellently said,
'are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold upon the
mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and
retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to
all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that
when past might be dissipated for ever, are by their connexion with
language always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves are perpetually
slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name
abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment.'

Men sometimes complain of the number of new theological terms which the
great controversies in which the Church from time to time has been
engaged, have left behind them. But this could not have been otherwise,
unless the gains through those controversies made, were presently to be
lost again; for as has lately been well said: 'The success and enduring
influence of any systematic construction of truth, be it secular or
sacred, depends as much upon an exact terminology, as upon close and
deep thinking itself. Indeed, unless the results to which the human
mind arrives are plainly stated, and firmly fixed in an exact
phraseology, its thinking is to very little purpose in the end.