Richard Chenevix Trench

“ What a hope full of immortality does this little word proclaim! how rich is it in all the highest elements of poetry, and of poetry in its noblest alliance, that is, in its alliance with faith— able as it is to cause all loathsome images of death and decay to disappear, not denying them, but suspending, losing, absorbing them in the sublimer thought of the victory over death, of that harvest of life which God shall one day so gloriously reap even there where now seems the very triumphing place of death. ”

“ It was not well with Italy, she might fill the world with exquisite specimens of her skill in the arts, with pictures and statues of rarest loveliness, but all higher national life was wanting to her during those centuries in which she degraded 'virtuoso,' or the virtuous man, to signify one skilled in the appreciation of painting, music, and sculpture; for these, the ornamental fringe of a people's life, can never, without loss of all manliness of character, be its main texture and woof—not to say that excellence in them has been too often dissociated from all true virtue and moral worth. ”

“ To study a people's language will be to study them, and to study them at best advantage; there, where they present themselves to us under fewest disguises, most nearly as they are. Too many have had a hand in the language as it now is, and in bringing it to the shape in which we find it, it is too entirely the collective work of a whole people, the result of the united contributions of all, it obeys too immutable laws, to allow any successful tampering with it, any making of it to witness to any other than the actual facts of the case. ”

“ If we knew all, we might be much more surprised to find that we had been talking poetry, without ever having so much as suspected this. For indeed poetry and passion seek to insinuate, and do insinuate themselves everywhere in language; they preside continually at the giving of names; they enshrine and incarnate themselves in these: for 'poetry is the mother tongue of the human race,' as a great German writer has said. ”

“ To one who admits the truth of this proverb it will be nothing strange that men should have agreed to call him a 'miser' or miserable, who eagerly scrapes together and painfully hoards the mammon of this world. Here too the moral instinct lying deep in all hearts has borne testimony to the tormenting nature of this vice, to the gnawing pains with which even in this present time it punishes its votaries, to the enmity which there is between it and all joy; and the man who enslaves himself to his money is proclaimed in our very language to be a 'miser,' or miserable man. ”

“ How little, again, the Italians, until quite later years, can have lived in the spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverenced the most illustrious among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured so far to degrade the name of one among their noblest, that every glib and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture- galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called 'cicerone,' or a Cicero! ”

“ Resuming, as words do, the past, shaping the future, how important it is that significant facts or tendencies in the world's history should receive their right names. It is a corrupting of the very springs and sources of knowledge, when we bind up not a truth, but an error, in the very nomenclature which we use. It is the putting of an obstacle in the way, which, however imperceptibly, is yet ever at work, hindering any right apprehension of the thing which has been thus erroneously noted. ”

“ Again, how well it is to have that spirit of depreciation, that eagerness to find spots and stains in the characters of the noblest and the best, who would otherwise oppress and rebuke us with a goodness and a greatness so immensely superior to our own,—met and checked by a word at once so expressive, and so little pleasant to take home to ourselves, as the French 'dénigreur,' a 'blackener.' This also has fallen out of use; which is a pity, seeing that the race which it designates is so far from being extinct. ”

“ I will not urge more than one; but that one, because in it is a lesson more for ourselves than for others, and with such I would fain bring these lectures to a close. How solemn a truth we express when we name our work in this world our 'vocation,' or, which is the same in homelier Anglo-Saxon, our 'calling.' What a calming, elevating, ennobling view of the tasks appointed us in this world, this word gives us. ”

“ Let me illustrate the importance of synonymous distinctions by another example, by the words, 'to invent' and 'to discover'; or 'invention' and 'discovery.' How slight may seem to us the distinction between them, even if we see any at all. Yet try them a little closer, try them, which is the true proof, by aid of examples, and you will perceive that they can by no means be indifferently used; that, on the contrary, a great truth lies at the root of their distinction. Thus we speak of the 'invention' of printing, of the 'discovery' of America. ”

“ Their knowledge is an inseparable part of ours: the present generation inherits and uses the scientific wealth of all the past. And this is the fortune, not only of the great and rich in the intellectual world, of those who have the key to the ancient storehouses, and who have accumulated treasures of their own, but the humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasonings into words, benefits by the labours of the greatest. ”

“ Thus, not to speak of mere technical matters, which would claim an utterance, how could the Greek language possess a word for 'idolatry,' so long as the sense of the awful contrast between the worship of the living God and of dead things had not risen up in their minds that spoke it? But when Greek began to be the native language of men, to whom this distinction between the Creator and the creature was the most earnest and deepest conviction of their souls, words such as 'idolatry,' 'idolater,' of necessity appeared. ”

“ The classical language of Greece had a word for 'saviour' which, though often degraded to unworthy uses, bestowed as a title of honour not merely on the false gods of heathendom, but sometimes on men, such as better deserved to be styled 'destroyers' than 'saviours' of their fellows, was yet in itself not unequal to the setting forth the central office and dignity of Him, who came into the world to save it. ”

“ We cannot employ ourselves better. There is nothing that will more help than will this to form an English heart in ourselves and in others. We could scarcely have a single lesson on the growth of our English tongue, we could scarcely follow up one of its significant words, without having unawares a lesson in English history as well, without not merely falling on some curious fact illustrative of our national life, but learning also how the great heart which is beating at the centre of that life was gradually shaped and moulded. ”

“ Profit there will be none, but on the contrary infinite loss. It is stagnant waters which corrupt themselves; not those in agitation and on which the winds are freely blowing. Words of passion and imagination are, as one so grandly called them of old, 'winds of the soul' ( [Greek: psyches anemoi] ) , to keep it in healthful motion and agitation, to lift it upward and to drive it onward, to preserve it from that unwholesome stagnation which constitutes the fatal preparedness for so many other and worse evils. ”

“ To take only one example—this, however, from Gothic art, which naturally yields the most remarkable— what exquisite poetry in the name of 'the rose window' or better still, 'the rose,' given to the rich circular aperture of stained glass, with its leaf-like compartments, in the transepts of a Gothic cathedral! Here indeed we may note an exception from that which usually finds place; for usually art borrows beauty from nature, and very faintly, if at all, reflects back beauty upon her. ”

“ If I wanted any further evidence of this, the moral atmosphere which words diffuse, I would ask you to observe how the first thing men do, when engaged in controversy with others, be it in the conflict of the tongue or the pen, or of weapons more wounding yet, if such there be, is ever to assume some honourable name to themselves, such as, if possible, shall beg the whole subject in dispute, and at the same time to affix on their adversaries a name which shall place them in a ridiculous or contemptible or odious light. ”

“ So strong has been the sense of Holy Scripture being 'the Book,' the worthiest and best, that book which explains all other books, standing up in their midst,—like Joseph's kingly sheaf, to which all the other sheaves did obeisance,— that this name of 'Bible' or 'Book' has been restrained to it alone: just as 'Scripture' means no more than 'writing' ”

“ The Greek Church has loved ever to style itself the Holy 'Orthodox' Church, the Latin, the Holy 'Catholic' Church. Follow up the thoughts which these words suggest. What a world of teaching they contain; above all when brought into direct comparison and opposition one with the other. How does all which is innermost in the Greek and Roman mind unconsciously reveal itself here; the Greek Church regarding as its chief blazon that its speculation is right, the Latin that its empire is universal. ”

“ It is the anti-national character of the Roman Catholic system which perhaps more than all else offends Englishmen; and if their sense of this should ever grow weak, their protest against that system would soon lose much of its energy and strength. But here, as everywhere else, knowledge must be the food of love. Your pupils must know something about England, if they are to love it; they must see some connexion of its past with its present, of what it has been with what it is, if they are to feel that past as anything to them. ”

“ When wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been scattered off by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that expressed these have perished too. ”

“ And although I cannot promise you that the study of synonyms, or the acquaintance with derivations, or any other knowledge but the very highest knowledge of all, will deliver you from the temptation to misuse this or any other gift of God—a temptation always lying so near us—yet I am sure that these studies rightly pursued will do much in leading us to stand in awe of this gift of speech, and to tremble at the thought of turning it to any other than those worthy ends for which God has endowed us with a faculty so divine. ”

“ I am sure, at least, that for many a young man his first discovery of the fact that words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world ”

“ But the Gospel has taught us another lesson, to find our sufficiency in God: and thus 'self- sufficient,' to the Greek suggesting no lack of modesty, of humility, or of any good thing, at once suggests such to us. 'Self-sufficiency' no man desires now to be attributed to him. The word carries for us its own condemnation; and its different uses, for honour once, for reproach now, do in fact ground themselves on the innermost differences between the religious condition of the world before Christ and after. ”

“ How deep an insight into the failings of the human heart lies at the root of many words; and if only we would attend to them, what valuable warnings many contain against subtle temptations and sins! Thus, all of us have felt the temptation of seeking to please others by an unmanly assenting to their opinion, even when our own independent convictions did not agree with theirs. The existence of such a temptation, and the fact that too many yield to it, are both declared in the Latin for a flatterer—'assentator'—that is, 'an assenter' ”

“ Now of all these causes the noblest is this—namely, that in the appointments of highest Wisdom there are epochs in the world's history, in which, more than at other times, new moral and spiritual forces are at work, stirring to their central depths the hearts of men. When it thus fares with a people, they make claims on their language which were never made on it before. ”

“ It was long before the Latin Christian writers extricated themselves from this embarrassment, for the 'Salutificator' of Tertullian, the 'Sospitator' of another, assuredly did not satisfy the need. The strong good sense of Augustine finally disposed of the difficulty. He made no scruple about using 'Salvator'; observing with a true insight into the conditions under which new words should be admitted, that however 'Salvator' might not have been good Latin before the Saviour came, He by his coming and by the work had made it such; for, as shadows wait upon substances, so words wait upon things. ”

“ Being like amber in its efficacy to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. ”

“ Must we not own then that there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of which we may hitherto have taken too little account, around us and about us? Is there not something very solemn and very awful in wielding such an instrument as this of language is, with such power to wound or to heal, to kill or to make alive? ”

“ Very curious is it to watch the varying fortune of words—the extent to which it has fared with them, as with persons and families; some having improved their position in the world, and attained to far higher dignity than seemed destined for them at the beginning, while others in a manner quite as notable have lost caste, have descended from their high estate to common and even ignoble uses. Titles of dignity and honour have naturally a peculiar liability to be some lifted up, and some cast down. ”

“ The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular mind have found therein their unconscious voice; and the single kinglier spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of things have oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some one word, which they have launched upon the world, and with which they have enriched it for ever—making in that new word a new region of thought to be henceforward in some sort the common heritage of all. ”