This doctrine was especially upheld by Origen, St.Jerome, and St.Augustine.Origen taught that "the language given at the first through Adam, the Hebrew, remained among that portion of mankind which was assigned not to any angel, but continued the portion of God himself." St.Augustine declared that, when the other races were divided by their own peculiar languages, Heber's family preserved that language which is not unreasonably believed to have been the common language of the race, and that on this account it was henceforth called Hebrew.

St.Jerome wrote, "The whole of antiquity affirms that Hebrew, in which the Old Testament is written, was the beginning of all human speech." Amid such great authorities as these even Gregory of Nyssa struggled in vain.

He seems to have taken the matter very earnestly, and to have used not only argument but ridicule.

He insists that God does not speak Hebrew, and that the tongue used by Moses was not even a pure dialect of one of the languages resulting from "the confusion." He makes man the inventor of speech, and resorts to raillery: speaking against his opponent Eunomius, he says that, "passing in silence his base and abject garrulity," he will "note a few things which are thrown into the midst of his useless or wordy discourse, where he represents God teaching words and names to our first parents, sitting before them like some pedagogue or grammar master." But, naturally, the great authority of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine prevailed; the view suggested by Lucretius, and again by St.Gregory of Nyssa, died, out; and "always, everywhere, and by all," in the Church, the doctrine was received that the language spoken by the Almighty was Hebrew,--that it was taught by him to Adam,--and that all other languages on the face of the earth originated from it at the dispersion attending the destruction of the Tower of Babel.( 414) (414) For Lucretius's statement, see the De Rerum Natura, lib.

v, Munro's edition, with translation, Cambridge, 1886, vol.iii.