d concord, a concord which wears a miraculous providential
character when it is appreciated without being understood.

[Sidenote: Expressions to be understood must be recreated, and so
changed.]

Primitive poetry is the basis of all discourse. If we open any ancient
book we come at once upon an elaborate language, and on divers
conventional concepts, of whose origin and history we hear nothing. We
must read on, until by dint of guessing and by confronting instances we
grow to understand those symbols. The writer was himself heir to a
linguistic tradition which he made his own by the same process of
adoption and tentative use by which we, in turn, interpret his phrases:
he understood what he heard in terms of his own experience, and
attributed to his predecessors (no matter what their incommunicable
feelings may have been) such ideas as their words generated in his own
thinking. In this way expressions continually change their sense; they
can communicate a thought only by diffusing a stimulus, and in passing
from mouth to mouth they will wholly reverse their connotation, unless
some external object or some recurring human situation gives them a
constant standard, by which private aberrations may be checked. Thus in
the first phrase of Genesis, "In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth," the words have a stable meaning only in so far as they
are indicative and bring us back to a stable object. What "heavens" and
"earth" stand for can be conveyed by gestures, by merely pointing up and
down; but beyond that sensuous connotation their meaning has entirely
changed since they were here written; and no two minds, even to-day,
will respond to these familiar words with exactly the same images.
"Beginning" and "created" have a superficial clearness, though their
implications cannot be defined without precipitating the most intricate
metaphysics, which would end in nothing but a proof that both terms were
ambiguous and unthinkable. As to the word "God," all mutual
understanding is impossible. It is a floating literary symbol, with a
value which, if we define it scientifically, becomes quite algebraic. As
no experienced object corresponds to it, it is without fixed indicative
force, and admits any sense which its context in any mind may happen to
give it. In the first sentence of Genesis its meaning, we may safely
say, is "a masculine being by whom heaven and earth were created." To
fill out this implication other ins