"Over Death Sea on a bridge of silver
The child to his Father's arms had passed!
Heaven was nearer than Tir-na-n'oge,
And the golden city was reached at last."
CHAPTER VIII.
THE OLDEST SON OF NOAH.
That eminent authority, Dr. Max Mueller, says, in his "Lectures on the
Science of Religion,"
"If we confine ourselves to the Asiatic continent, with its important
peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of drifting human
speech three, and only three, oases have been formed in which, before
the beginning of all history, language became permanent and
traditional--assumed, in fact, a new character, a character totally
different from the original character of the floating and constantly
varying speech of human beings. These three oases of language are known
by the name of Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic. In these three centres,
more particularly in the Aryan and Semitic, language ceased to be
natural; its growth was arrested, and it became permanent, solid,
petrified, or, if you like, historical speech. I have always maintained
that this centralization and traditional conservation of language could
only have been the result of religious and political influences, and I
now mean to show that we really have clear evidence of three independent
settlements of religion--the Turanian, the Aryan, and the
Semitic--concomitantly with the three great settlements of language.
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