Human language has been wrought by centuries of poets and orators into so fluid and searching a medium that we are apt to forget that it is only a code of signs and a crude one at that. That a man can give no reason for the faith that is in him is not necessarily the fault of the faith; it may be the fault of the tongue he speaks. We talk of our language, but we forget that we have many languages in various stages of advance. For example, railway signals constitute a language; but it is a language at so primitive a stage that it has not yet got beyond the two primal ideas—good and evil, yes and no, safe and unsafe. Any one who chooses may imagine the language of railway signals developed into delicacy and variety as the language of the tongue has developed. A particular tint of peacock green in the night signals might mean "The chairman of the board is recovering from influenza," a certain tinge of purple in the red light might convey "An old gentleman wearing white spats has just fallen out of the train." But to whatever extent the language of signals might be amplified, it is obvious, from their nature, that sooner or later a crisis might arise, an unprecedented event might happen, such, let us say, as the engine-driver going mad and thinking he was the Archbishop of Canterbury, the symbols for which were not down in the code, and which, therefore, however obvious it might be, it would be impossible to signal down the line. Now it is surely equally possible that something might happen in the human soul which was simply not down in the old code of language: to ask a man to tell you what had happened would simply be absurd; to ask him to think it had not happened, much more so. Unless we are very much mistaken, Mr. Lowes Dickinson and every other man has precisely such a dumb certainty in his soul and the only name we can give to it is "the universal good."
-February 16, 1901, The Speaker
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