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THE MYSTERY LANGUAGE
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and characteristics (like the Sun, the great promoter of life but frequent causer of death), so do the ideograms convey contrasting and contrary ideas; and it is owing to this that barec has, in Job ii. 9, been translated by the Vulgate "bless" and by the Anglican Authorized Version "curse.'
Although the view that the ideograms (or letters) of the Hebrew alphabet have proper meanings of their own, irrespective of their alphabetic value, has been long lost, a remarkable testimony to the correctness of the claim is found in the apacryphal Gospels of the Infancy. In these the child Jesus is said to have perplexed and even exasperated his teachers, when learning his letters, by persistently asking the meaning of Aleph (a) before passing on to Beth (B).. The writers of these narratives must, therefore, have been dimly aware of a tradition to the effect that the letters had at one time borne an individual significance, while placing it on record that the teachers of their day had no knowledge of that to which the tradition referred.
The study of the Mystery Language gives prominence to a very grave and yet perhaps not wholly unexpected consequence, which has followed the extinction of that language in its modern representatives-for some of the ideas intended to have been transmitted have completely changed their form and character; or, when in part preserving their original form, have been referred to a wholly different origin and have gained a wholly different sense. The word " mystery is a very good example of the way in which an actual can disappear
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