after a while have been wholly lost.

Moffat, in his _Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa_, gives
us a very remarkable example of the disappearing of one of the most
significant words from the language of a tribe sinking ever deeper in
savagery; and with the disappearing of the word, of course, the
disappearing as well of the great spiritual fact and truth whereof that
word was at once the vehicle and the guardian. The Bechuanas, a Caffre
tribe, employed formerly the word 'Morimo,' to designate 'Him that is
above' or 'Him that is in heaven' and attached to the word the notion
of a supreme Divine Being. This word, with the spiritual idea
corresponding to it, Moffat found to have vanished from the language of
the present generation, although here and there he could meet with an
old man, scarcely one or two in a thousand, who remembered in his youth
to have heard speak of 'Morimo'; and this word, once so deeply
significant, only survived now in the spells and charms of the so-
called rainmakers and sorcerers, who misused it to designate a fabulous
ghost, of whom they told the absurdest and most contradictory things.

And as there is no such witness to the degradation of the savage as the
brutal poverty of his language, so is there nothing that so effectually
tends to keep him in the depths to which he has fallen. You cannot
impart to any man more than the words which he understands either now
contain, or can be made, intelligibly to him, to contain. Language is
as truly on one side the limit and restraint of thought, as on the
other side that which feeds and unfolds thought. Thus it is the ever-
repeated complaint of the missionary that the very terms are well-nigh
or wholly wanting in the dialect of the savage whereby to impart to him
heavenly truths; and not these only; but that there are equally wanting
those which should express the nobler emotions of the human heart.