Meister," "This book could not have been written in English," and with his Scotch directness and courage gives literal translations of some passages, of which we might say that they could not now be printed in English. They were and are just as bad in the German, though the foreign language often acts as a kind of veil or disguise to screen the full atrocity from the English reader of the original. It is very safe to say that what will not bear full translation into English is not fit to read in any language-unless when the historian or scholar is reading, as a physician investigates, to understand the diseases of the world. Fortunately, the English reader will have little of this obtruded upon him. English translators have, for the most part, been persons of clear judgment and good taste, and English and American publishers have had, on the whole, a sound judgment of what the reading public of the English-speaking world would bear. Rather they have given us a glorious accumulation of all that is grand, beautiful, and good in all the languages of the earth.

So considered, we view our English privileges with wonder and delight.

Do you care for Homer or Vergil, for Demosthenes or Cicero, for Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, or Tacitus, or Plutarch, for Aristotle, Plato, or Xenophon, for Eschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles, for Aristophanes, Ovid, or Juvenal, for the fables of Æsop or The Arabian Nights Entertainments, for Cervantes' "Don Quixote" or the "Chronicle of the Cid," for Dante or Petrarch or Boccaccio or Ariosto, for Kepler or Leibnitz or Fichte or Kant or Descartes, for Spinoza or Swedenborg, for Goethe or Schiller or Lessing, for Fénelon or Bossuet, Malebranche or Pascal, for Molière, Voltaire, or Rousseau, for Dumas, Balzac, or Victor Hugo, for Ibsen or

Tolstoi, or a thousand others? You may read them all in the language in which you read your morning paper. Are you interested to know about the Vedas or the Eddas or the Zend Avesta? You may read all that is most important of them in English. Would you learn what Mohammed really taught? There is an English translation of the Koran. Do you wish to understand the teaching of Buddhism? Many admirable and learned English works will give you translations and digests of the chief monuments of that faith. Scholarly translations of the texts and classics of Confucianism are easily accessible in English. You may read in English the songs of the Troubadours, the inscriptions on the bricks and clay cylinders of Babylon and Nineveh, or the hieroglyphics on the tombs and pyramids of Egypt. Of modern works, anything that commands wide attention is almost instantly rendered into English. The chances are that an English translation will be published in England or America simultaneously with the appearance of the original in its own country. Through our native language we may keep our finger on the pulse of all the world. By its facility and felicity of translation, its power to express the essential thought of any writing produced in any language, English has become the Pentecost of the nations, so that their utterances in every variety of human speech we may hear "every man in our own tongue wherein we were born."

That this is no rhetorical rapture the following incident will show: A young minister had failed of a college education because of the belief that he must lose not a moment in going to men with the Christian message "to preach the gospel.” Later, as he came to see how much that gospel message involved, he was

aware that he had made a mistake, which it was then too late to correct. What could he do? He resolved, "I will study, as far as I can reach it in English, the best of all that college men learn, so that when I meet a college man I shall know something of the best of all he knows, and be able to converse with him intelligently." Right there he began a course of self-education which has placed him among the scholarly men of the world. That man was the one now honored as Bishop Vincent, who told this story of his own youth at the great Chautauqua which he founded, and whose Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Association has opened the treasures of learning through the English tongue to thousands of readers, young and old, in homes, on farms, in factories and offices, all over the Englishspeaking world. In his own person, and through the great society he has founded, he has demonstrated that the essentials of a liberal education may be secured by any industrious student by means of the English language alone.

The scholar and the university should be in full sympathy with such wide dissemination of the best results of university training through the medium of the "cosmopolitan English speech" accessible to all our people. The desirability of such wide diffusion of learning was well stated by President Hibben of Princeton University in a noble address recently given before the Brooklyn Institute of Fine Arts on "The Functions of the University in America," as follows:

"The world is coming into possession of a greater mass of knowledge than ever before, a knowledge of a peculiar kind-that which gives a man a more intimate knowledge of himself, of the conditions of his life, of the relations which he sustains, and of the obligations which rest upon

him as a son, father, neighbor, friend, and citizen-a knowledge which, if properly apprehended and properly applied, will tend, not merely to preserve human life, but to enrich and ennoble it. This human knowledge must be both gained and augmented by university investigation and reach, and it is incumbent upon the university also to cause this knowledge to be diffused as widely as possible, so that it may become the free possession of the many, and not the hidden secret of the few. The university, not merely through its teaching body, but through the men whom it is yearly equipping and sending forth into the work of the world, must be able to interpret this knowledge, to simplify it, and to express it in terms which the multitude will be able to understand and use."

CHAPTER V

ENGLISH SYNONYMS THEIR
ABUNDANCE AND HELPFULNESS

The word synonym is from the Greek, a compound of syn- (or sun-), meaning "with" or "together," and onoma, "name," and is applied to any one of two or more words that "name together, "-fellow-names for the same thing. We might call a pair of synonyms in English "twin-names" for one meaning. From this we have the adjective synonymous, which in strictness signifies "equivalent in meaning;" but the adjective synonymous holds more strictly to the original meaning than the noun synonym. Most people know that if you say one word is a synonym of another, it may not mean exactly the same thing. If you say the words are synonymous, on the other hand, they then feel that you mean they are identical.

As a matter of fact, it is very rare to find any two words that have precisely the same meaning so as to be always interchangeable. There is almost always a difference either in meaning or in use. You will find many words that you can not discriminate in meaning by the dictionary, but the moment you attempt to use them you will see you can use one in some connections, while in others you must not employ it. Take the two verbs begin and commence, with their nouns, beginning and commencement. Their meaning seems at first sight to be identical. We may say, "The service will com