him? In what other way can we explain that vast and preponderating
weight thrown into the scale of goodness and truth, which, despite of
all in the other scale, we must thankfully acknowledge that his
language never is without? How else shall we account for that sympathy
with the right, that testimony against the wrong, which, despite of all
aberrations and perversions, is yet the prevailing ground-tone of all?

But has man fallen, and deeply fallen, from the heights of his original
creation? We need no more than his language to prove it. Like
everything else about him, it bears at once the stamp of his greatness
and of his degradation, of his glory and of his shame. What dark and
sombre threads he must have woven into the tissue of his life, before
we could trace those threads of darkness which run through the tissue
of his language! What facts of wickedness and woe must have existed in
the one, ere such words could exist to designate these as are found in
the other! There have never wanted those who would make light of the
moral hurts which man has inflicted on himself, of the sickness with
which he is sick; who would persuade themselves and others that
moralists and divines, if they have not quite invented, have yet
enormously exaggerated, these. But are statements of the depth of his
fall, the malignity of the disease with which he is sick, found only in
Scripture and in sermons? Are those who bring forward these statements
libellers of human nature? Or are not mournful corroborations of the
truth of these assertions imprinted deeply upon every province of man's
natural and spiritual life, and on none more deeply than on his
language? It needs but to open a dictionary, and to cast our eye
thoughtfully down a few columns, and we shall find abundant
confirmation of this sadder and sterner estimate of man's moral and
spiritual condition. How else shall we explain this long catalogue of
words, having all to do with sin or with sorrow, or with both? How came