It has been well observed by the learned German writer, J. D. Michaelis, that “some virtues are more sedulously cultivated by moralists, when the language has fit names for indicating them; whereas they are but superficially treated of, or rather neglected, in nations where such virtues have not so much as a name. Languages may obviously do injury to morals and religion by their equivocation; by false accessories, inseparable from the principal idea; and by their poverty.” It is a striking fact, noted by an English traveller, that the native language of Van Dieman’s Land has four words to express the idea of taking life, not one of which indicates the deep-lying distinction between to kill and to murder; while any word for love is wanting to it altogether. One of the most formidable obstacles which Christian missionaries have encountered in teaching the doctrines and precepts of the Gospel to the heathen, has been the absence from their languages of a spiritual and ethical nomenclature. It is in vain that the religious teachers of a people present to them a doctrinal or ethical system inculcating virtues and addressed to faculties, whose very existence their language, and consequently the conscious self-knowledge of the people, do not recognize. Equally vain is it to reprehend vices which have no name by which they can be described and denounced, as things to be loathed and shunned. Hence, in translating the Bible into the languages of savage nations, the translators have been compelled to employ merely provisional phrases, until they could develop a dialect fitted to convey moral as well as intellectual truth. It is said that the Ethiopians, having but one word for “person” and “nature,” could not apprehend the doctrine of the union of Christ’s two natures in one single person. There are languages of considerable cultivation in which it is not easy to find a term for the Supreme Being. Seneca wrote a treatise on “Providence,” which had not even a name at Rome in the time of Cicero. It is a curious fact that the English language, rich as it is in words to express the most complex religious ideas, as well as in terms characterizing vices and crimes, had until about two centuries ago no word for “selfishness,” the root of all vices, nor any single word for “suicide.” The Greeks and Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, but the Christian idea of “sin” was utterly unknown to the Pagan mind. Vice they regarded as simply a relaxed energy of the will, by which it yielded to the allurements of sensual pleasure; and _vir_tue, literally “manliness,” was the determined spirit, the courage and vigor with which it resisted such temptations. But the idea of “holiness” and the antithetic idea of sin were such utter strangers to the Pagan mind that it would have been impossible to express them in either of the classical tongues of antiquity. As De Maistre has strikingly observed, man knew well that he could “irritate” God or “a god,” but not that he could “offend” him. The words “crime” and “criminal” belong to all languages: those of “sin” and “sinner” belong only to the Christian tongue. For a similar reason, man could always call God “Father,” which expresses only a relation of creation and of power; but no man, of his own strength, could say “my Father”! for this is a relation of love, foreign even to Mount Sinai, and which belongs only to Calvary.