the other. Under the regime of the ghosts the
laws were not understood to exist in the nature of things; they were
supposed to be irresponsible commands, and these commands were not
supposed to rest upon reason; they were simply the product of arbitrary
will. These penalties for the violations of those laws were as cruel
as the penalties were absurd. There were over two hundred offenses for
which man was punished with death. Think of it! And these laws are
said to have come from a most merciful God. And yet we have become
civilized to that degree in this country that in the State of New York
there is only one crime punishable with death. Think of it! Did I not
tell you that we were now civilizing our gods? The tendency of those
horrible laws, the tendency of those frightful penalties, was to blot
the idea of justice from the human soul. Now, I want to show you how
perfectly every department of human knowledge, or rather of ignorance,
was saturated with superstition. I will for a moment refer to the
science of language.

It was thought by our fathers that Hebrew was the original language;
that it was taught to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by the
Almighty himself. Every fact inconsistent with that idea was thrown
away. According to the ghosts, the trouble at the Tower of Babel
accounted for the fact that all the people did not speak the Hebrew
language. The Babel question settled all questions in the science of
language. After a time so many facts were found to be so inconsistent
with the Hebrew idea that it began to fall into disrepute, and other
languages began to be used. Andrew Kent published a work on the
science of language, in which he stated that God spoke to Adam, and
Adam answered, in Hebrew, and that the serpent probably spoke to Eve in
French. In 1580 another celebrated work was published at Antwerp, in
which the whole matter was put at rest, showing beyond a doubt that the
language spoken in Paradise was neither more nor less than plain
Holland Dutch. Another celebrated writer, a contemporary of Sir Isaac
Newton, discouraged the idea that all languages could be traced to one;
he maintained that language was of natural growth; that we speak as
naturally as we grow; we talk as naturally as sings a bird, or as
blooms and blossoms a flower. Experience teaches us that this be so;
words are continually dying and continually may being born--words are
the garments of thought. Through the lapse