Christ's pervading presence, not only spiritually but bodily. The throne of Christ at God's right hand is indeed in the transcendent heaven, yet is he effectively present through the whole, inclusive of paradise, as our President is present in all our America. To this beholding of Jesus by the eye of that glorified spirit, distance is no difficulty. Nor does the pure spirit need words, made of atmosphere, to exchange the pure thought with other minds. Nor does any barrier exclude Christ from perpetual visitations and extended residences there. For here, as in the highest heavens, the presence of this "myself" is the true bliss and glory of these blessed ones; less here than there, but in both the fullest glory of which the spirits disembodied and re-embodied are capable recipients. Christ is the sun amidst his stars, without whom they are darkness and iceberg. And reciprocally their salvation and glorification were the joy that was set before him, for which he endured the cross.

But it is said (Matt. xxv, 30), the kingdom is prepared for you from before the foundation of the world. How comes it, then, that here the place is not to be prepared for them until after the crucifixion? Our reply would be, that the kingdom of glory is prepared for all the holy beings, including redeemed man, from before the foundation of the world. But the "place" in that kingdom is not prepared for the post-crucifixion saints, and not fully prepared for any saints, until after crucifixion. The kingdom is the "house," and that is eternal; the "place" of the redeemed is to be in the "house," and not to be completely prepared until the sacrifice that purchases it is finished. So this "house" of God, like the temple, was of old; but the new court for the new class of occupants was now first to be prepared.

Verses 4, 5. The "whither " of this departure, and its "way," they knew, because Jesus had told them. The "whither" was "to the Father" in the transcendent heavens; "the way" was through the death of the cross. And now in Thomas's positivenegative interruption the doubter seems to be a prompt denier. And in point of space and distance his denial is true. By what route through space Jesus will go, to where of the heavens. Jesus will arrive, he knows not. Yet very probably he exaggerates his ignorance in order to draw out from Jesus a fuller unfolding of the future. He truly desires an account of the route and the goal.

And here is a basal faith in Jesus. He does "believe" that Jesus truly knows, if he pleases to reveal.

Verses 6, 7. Jesus refuses to be turned from his track of thought, requiring the whole "believe in me" of verse 1. He will not be drawn from the rich spirituality of the matter into a barren directory. He embodies the whole matter in his concrete self. Christ is Christianity. Accept a whole Christ, and you have a full salvation. Ask you the "way?" His crucified body is "the way." The "truth?" His all-wise Spirit. The "life?" His life, the life of your life everlasting. Settle all this, and the topography may come in as a lesser afterthought. "To the Father," the transcendent goal, by literal ascent, or “to the Father," by spiritual approach, he is the sole "way." Even the redeemed who never heard of Christ are redeemed by him. And through, not "by," is the literal Greek. Through this living bridge, spanning the chasm, do we pass to the Father. "From henceforth" means not (as many commentators) from the time of the crucifixion, or the time of this momentous converse. "From henceforth" means "from" the time of truly seeing Jesus as he is.* The true sight of God commences with the true sight of Christ.

Verses 8-10. Thomas's doubt seemed to cover the things of the unseen realities, but Philip's doubt at first sight seems to be the doubt of the atheist, who says: "I will believe in God. when I see God." But it is not of God's existence that Thomas doubts, but of God as the authenticator of Christ as God. Yet Philip doubtless knew that the things seen by the spirit's eye, the eye of our highest intelligence, are far more sure than those seen by the fleshly eye. The fleshly eye, for instance, sees a machine which is truly constructed according to geometrical laws. The spirit's eye sees the laws themselves. The former, the machine, is transitory; the latter, the laws, are eternal. And yet Philip forgot this when he asked for a fleshly sight of "the Father." He may, as Meyer supposes, have asked for a theophany such as Moses beheld (Exod. xxiv, 10), or, we may add, such as John saw in vision (Rev. iv). If so, he asked for the temporary, rejecting the permanent. "So long time with you" expresses not pathos (Meyer) but rebuke. guilty superficiality which could see "so long" the divine in

*See Whedon's Com., Rev. xiv, 13.

It was a

Jesus, and self-avowed by Jesus, without becoming permanently stereotyped with the impression that God was with him. The spirit's eye that has even once seen this Son hath seen the Father too. "I am in the Father," as the flower is in the bud, to be unfolded in power and beauty to the spirit's eye. "The Father in me," as the divine fire was in Moses's burning bush. "The words that I say unto you I speak not from myself," as the words from the bush were not spoken by the bush as his. organ. They were the words of Jehovah authenticating the bush. Doeth "his works," as well as uttereth "the words." And if my "works" attest myself as superhuman, and so infallibly trustworthy, so my "words" attest me by direct declaration as divine. As, therefore, "ye believe in God," so do you "believe in me," authenticated by God. And when I utter words of assurance and consolation, "believe;" and, believing, "let not your heart be troubled."

ART. III.-MIGRATION OF LANGUAGE..

HOW OUR ENGLISH CAME FROM ASIA TO DENMARK..

WHAT is here proposed to be done may be illustrated by what has been done in the case of the gypsies and their speech. Miklosich, a scholar of Vienna, has traced by their vocabulary their line of march from India to Europe; and that with the aid of scarcely a single historic clew. The basis of their speech he finds to be the Hindu, a shoot of the Sanskrit, introduced even in the Vedas as the language of the vulgus, like the Low Latin of Cicero's day-the battare for pugnare, ballare for saltare, gerula for puella. Persian elements indicate a sojourn in the reaches south of the Caspian, and Armenian words show a slow movement through the lands below the Black Sea. That they entered Europe through a Greek-speaking country, their last residence before their dispersion, is also fairly proven.

In geology, we trace lines of movement by way-side scatterings dropped from the traveling mass; in philology we trace those lines by gatherings picked up and carried on to the place of final deposit. In this way we may search for the path, often 23-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. I.

faintly marked, now lost, and now re-appearing, by which the oldest tongue in the group of our ancestral kindred made its way from the primal Asian home to the low-lying margin of the North Sea, the region of Holland and Jutland, and of Schleswig-Holstein.

There could not well be, within the temperate zone, a wider contrast than that between the land from which those wanderers departed and that to which they came. They left mountain gorges where the traveler northward climbs passes higher than Mont Blanc, on his way to "the Roof of the World;" where from grassy, treeless plains, beneath dry, bright skies, the streams run swiftly to far-off southern bays, and where the Oxus, "majestic river, floated on" to "emerge and shine upon the Aral Sea." They came to a dull, flat shore, where "the lazy Scheldt" creeps through its sediment of mud, a land of gloomy rain, of raw and restless wind and harsh voiced surge, where those ancestors of ours began their great career in the West amid marshes, fogs, and forests. Slowly and loiteringly they made their way from one home to the other. They spent centuries where now a traveler, even a tourist, needs to spend but days.

Satisfying proof is found that back of the closely related languages now prevailing in north-western Europe was one, the mother-tongue of many people now kindred, once identical. It was used by all our then undivided branch of the great family of energetic, overmastering peoples whose languages are called Indo-European, or, by an easier term, Aryan. This mothertongue, sister of the Sanskrit, the Greek, and the Latin, is named the Teutonic. This word Teutonic (Thindise, then Teutisch, then Deutsch-Dutch) means popular, public, national. As is well known, it is now employed to designate the people whom the Romans taught us to call Germans, while the general term “Dutch” we properly limit to a small nation on the narrow delta of the Rhine.

Before it entered Europe, this Teutonic had begun to divide into branches, the Gothic, the Norse, the Low German, and the High German. Of these the Gothic was long thought to be not a co-ordinate branch, but a real trunk from which the others had sprung, and it was so thought because in forms and processes it was nearer than any other in agreement with the primitive

Aryan speech. It was, too, the first of its family to have and hold an abiding place in the literature of the world.

In the library of the University of Upsala, in Sweden, is the Silver Manuscript, the most valuable literary treasure that Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, the western hive of the Gothic race) possesses. It contains the four gospels in the Gothic tongue. The noble characters are illuminated in silver upon a purple ground, and at the beginning of each section a few words are blazoned in gold instead of silver. At the bottom of each page is an imposing arrangement of a gallery on arches with Corinthian columns, between which are references, as in the margins of our Bibles, enabling the reader to find the parallel passage of the different gospels. The whole is in solid silver binding, and it well bears the name of CODEX ARGENTEUS. It was made at Ravenna, in Italy, a hundred years after the death of the great bishop who made the translation, whose labor, learning, and piety it brings vividly to remembrance. A Swedish general of the great Gustavus Adolphus found it at Prague nearly three hundred years ago. After so many centuries of unknown adventure it has a fitting and honorable rest among its natural guardians, the kinsmen of its author. In the Ambrosian Library at Milan, about the year 1820, some strange discoveries were made. Three manuscripts in Latin were found to be palimpsests, that is, twice written, the first writing erased to give place to the second. In these the erasure was imperfect, and a careful tracing by Count Castiglione proved the first writing to have been this same Gothic Scripture. He rescued much, and the rescued fragments have proved of great philological value. From such sources we have what we have of the language actually spoken by Alaric and his long-haired warriors as they stood at the gates of Rome to receive its ransom, and in which the gallant barbarian forbade his men to touch, in war-. fare, either women or church properties. With words like these he ordered the turning of the river Busento until his own burial might be had in its channel, lest in some reverse of following times his mighty bones might be found and make a Roman holiday. Under Theodoric the Great the Gothic power in the South reached its highest point; it then vanished like frost-work in the sun, and left of itself no record in speech of its own using. To Roman ears the Gothic was harsh jargon,