Yet the subject in itself is not without a high interest and
importance; relating, as it does, to the languages and literature of a
population amounting to nearly or quite seventy millions, or more than
three times as great as that of the United States. These topics
embrace, of course, the history of mental cultivation among the Slavic
nations from its earliest dawn; their intellectual development; the
progress of man among them as a thinking, sentient, social being,
acting and acted upon in his various relations to other minds. They
relate, indeed, to the history of intellectual culture in one of its
largest geographical and ethnological divisions.
In this connection it is a matter of no small interest, to mark the
influence which Christianity has exercised upon the language and
literature of these various nations. It is to the introduction and
progress of Christianity, that they owe their written language; and to
the versions of the Scriptures into their own dialects are they
indebted, not only for their moral and religious culture, but also for
the cultivation and, in a great degree, the existence of their
national literature. The same influence Christianity is even now
exerting upon the hitherto unwritten languages of the American forest,
of the islands of the Pacific, of the burning coasts of Africa, of the
mountains of Kurdistan; and with the prospect of results still wider
and more propitious.
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