EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/771

Exported from Wikisource on November 5, 2024

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UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES

The Universalist Church embraces but a fraction of those who hold the Universalist belief. The literature of religion, the testimony of common knowledge, the drift of theological thinking, equally with the results of expert investigation, confirm this conclusion. But the denomination holds aloft the banner, conducts the campaign of education and organization, and represents in the religious world the principle, that the best possible outcome is to be expected to the human experiment.

Work.—Some idea of the work carried on by the denomination may be derived from the extent and variety of its organized forces. There were in 1907 about 1000 parishes on its roll; and these, with large numbers of families not included in parishes, were organized into 41 state and provincial conventions; into a National Young People's Christian Union of over 600 local societies, with a membership of 10,000; into one National Women's Missionary Association and several state societies; and into one General Convention, with its Board of Trustees, Secretary, Superintendent, and Committees on Missions, Education, Investments, Ways and Means and Fellowship.

a. The Home Missionary work devolves in the first instance on the several State Conventions, which have a Board and local secretaries and superintendents charged with this particular business in their several territories. In the next place, the Home Missionary work in new fields and where the local organization is weak, is in charge of the Board of Trustees of the General Convention. They employ a Southern Missionary and a General Superintendent, and appoint and aid in maintaining superintendents and missionaries in the newer states and Territories—as the North-Western Superintendent, the California Superintendent, &c.

b. Foreign Missions. In 1907 the Universalist denomination had for about fifteen years maintained a mission in Japan, where five American and five native missionaries were regularly employed, with teachers and helpers of varying numbers. The parent church of this mission is established in Tokyo, and plantings have been made at eight or nine other points throughout the empire. A Girls' Home is maintained in Tokyo, and a considerable work in teaching and training is conducted under the auspices of the Mission in universities and other schools elsewhere. A mission under the auspices of the Universalist General Convention is also maintained at Columbia, Province of Camagüey, Cuba.

c. The educational interests and activities of the denomination are expressed in four colleges, established by the Universalists—Tufts College (1852), at Medford, Massachusetts; Lombard College (1855; opened in 1852 as Illinois Liberal Institute), at Galesburg, Illinois; St Lawrence University (1856), at Canton, New York; and Buchtel College (1872), at Akron, Ohio; three theological schools, connected with the first three colleges just named and founded respectively in 1869, 1881 and 1858; and three academies, Dean Academy, Franklin, Massachusetts, Goddard Seminary, Barre, Vermont, and Westbrook Seminary, Portland, Maine; and a publishing house in Boston with a branch in Chicago is one of the denomination's chief agencies for the spread of the knowledge of what it holds to be the truth.

d. The Chapin Home in New York, the Church of the Messiah Home in Philadelphia, the Washburne Home in Minneapolis and the Bethany Home in Boston are examples of the benevolent and charitable work in which the Universalist body is interested and enlisted.

As stated above, the Universalist denomination embraces about 1000 churches, with congregations numbering about 200,000 persons; a membership of communicants reported in 1906 as 55,831; a membership in Sunday schools of 52,538; and church property valued at $10,598,100.39.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The Universalist Quarterly Review (Boston, 1843-91); T. Whittemore, Modern History of Universalism (Boston, 1830); Richard Eddy, Universalism in America (2 vols., 1884); J. G. Adams, Fifty Notable Years (Boston, 1882); Abel C. Thomas, A Century of Universalism (Philadelphia, 1870); J. W. Hanson, Universalism in the First Five Hundred Years of the Christian Church (Boston and Chicago, 1902); T. B. Thayer, Origin and History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment (Boston, 1885), tracing the doctrine directly to heathen sources; T. B. Thayer, The Theology of Universalism (Boston, 1862); I. M. Atwood (ed.), The Latest Word of Universalism, Essays by Thirteen Representative Clergymen (Boston, 1880); Manuals of Faith and Duty, a set of eleven volumes by different writers, treating of the chief doctrines, institutions and problems of religion in the modern era; Orello Cone, The Gospel and its Earliest Interpretations (New York, 1898); and biographies of John Murray, Hosea Ballou, Edwin H. Chapin, Thomas J. Sawyer, Alonzo Ames Miner, James Henry Tuttle, &c. (I. M. A.)

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES. The inconveniences resulting from the diversity of languages have been felt since the dawn of civilization. Even the most gifted linguist cannot master more than a comparatively small number of languages, and has to rely more or less on interpreters in his intercourse with speakers of foreign languages.

Advancing civilization brought with it a partial remedy at different periods and in different parts of the world by the spread of such languages as Assyrian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, English over a wide area as the accompaniment of political supremacy, or as a vehicle of culture. Even when Latin split up into the Romance languages, and ceased to be a living language itself, it still survived as the common learned language of Europe both in speech and writing (see LATIN LANGUAGE and CLASSICS), till the rapid development of modern science and modern thought and the rapidly increasing complexity of modern life outstripped the limited range of a language never suited for international use.

Meanwhile the growth of the spirit of nationality has largely increased the number of literary languages. Russian men of science are no longer content to record their discoveries in French or German. The English student of science or philosophy has to leave unread many important works written in the more remote European languages, or make their acquaintance through an often inaccurate translation—perhaps in a language of which he is only imperfectly master.

The question of the adoption of a common language becomes, therefore, more and more pressing.

The most obvious solution of the problem would be the adoption of some one existing language as a means of international communication. But which? To revive the international use of Latin is out of the question. If it is to be a dead language, post-classical Greek would afford a more flexible—and perhaps an easier—means of expression. If we dismiss dead languages as impracticable, the choice of a living language raises new difficulties. To exalt English, or French, or Spanish to the rank of a world-language would give its native speakers such an advantage over the other nationalities that it has been seriously proposed to disarm international jealously by selecting such a language as Norwegian, which is spoken by a small community and is at the same time comparatively simple in structure.

But even if agreement were possible, we are still met by the difficulty that to the average human being it is practically impossible to acquire anything like an easy, thorough command of any foreign language. No natural language is really easy. In fact, we may go further and say that all languages are equally difficult (see H. Sweet, Practical Study of Languages, p. 66); although some are made more difficult than they need be by the way in which they are written—by the crabbedness of their alphabet, or by their unphonetic spelling—by the want of handbooks or their unpractical character, by the artificiality of their literature, and other purely external causes. Norwegian is easy to a Swede because it is practically a mere dialect of his own language: he knows two-thirds of it already. But that does not prove that Norwegian is easy in itself—that it would be easy, for instance, to an Oriental. The dialects of Chinese are mutually unintelligible, but it takes a Chinaman only about six months to learn another dialect, which would occupy even a gifted European at least three years to learn to speak; and yet Chinese is, from a European point of view, far simpler in structure than Norwegian, or even English.

Natural languages are difficult because they are imperfect expressions of thought: because language is only partly rational. The greatest difficulty of a language is the vocabulary; and the foundation of the vocabulary of all languages is practically arbitrary: there is no connection between sound and meaning except in a few isolated words. And even that part of a language which can be brought more or less under general rules is full of irregularities and exceptions, ambiguities and redundancies of expression, and superfluous or irrational distinctions such as those of grammatical gender, so that when we have learnt one sentence we can never be sure that it will serve as a pattern for another.

These considerations suggest a further step towards the

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EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/771

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