TONGUES, GIFT OF, a gift of the apostles and other Christians in the first ages of the church. The main passages in the New Testament relating to it are Acts ii. 3-21; Corinthians xii. 10, 28; xiii. 1, and particularly xiv. Allusions to it will also be found in Mark xvi. 17; Acts x. 46, and xix. 6. The only allusion to the possession of the gift in later times is in Irenmus, Adv. Hon vi. 6: " We have many brethren in the church having prophetical gifts, and by the Spirit speaking in all kinds of languages." From these data, the following conclusions have been drawn by one of the most recent and intelligent expositors of the epistles to the Corinthians. The gift in question is represented as something entirely new in the apostolic age: " They shall speak with new tongues," Mark xvi. 17. The effect on the spectators at the day of Pentecost is of universal astonishment. It is represented as a special mark of conversion, immediately preceding or following baptism. It is a gift " of the Spirit:" " They began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance"—Acts 4. It was, moreover, closely connected with the gift of " prophesying"-1 Corinthians xii. 10, 28; xiv. 1-6. It appears to be distinguished from prophesying by consisting not of direct warning, exhortation, or prediction, but of thanksgiving, praise, prayer, sing ing, and other expressions of devotion. It was an utterance of the heart and feelings, rather than of the understanding, so that the actual words and meaning were generally unintelligible to the bystanders, and sometimes to the speakers themselves: "He that speaketh with a tongue speaketh not to men but to God; for no one heareth; and in the Spirit he speaketh mysteries"-1 Corinthians xiv. 2, 4, etc. So far, the account of the gift seems intelligible, It was, as Dean Stanley says, "a trance or ecstasy, which in moments of great religious fervor, especially at the moment of conversion, seized the early believers: and this fervor 'vented itself in expressions of thanksgiving, in fragments of psalmody or hymnody, and prayer, which to the speaker himself conveyed an irresist ible sense of communion with God; and to the bystanders, an impression of some extraordinary manifestation of power, but not necessarily any instruction or teaching, and sometimes even having the appearance of wild excitement, like that of madness or intoxication." The special difficulty, however, remains, viz., as to the character of,
intelligibility which, on one prominent occasion, seems to have belonged to the gift. Glossa, or the word translated "tongue," does not necessarily imply a distinct language of a people; this is usually expressed in the New Testament by dialektos. But in the description in the Acts ii. 6, 8, it is expressly said: "Every man heard them in his own language" (te idia dialekto). hear we every man in his own language" (the same phrase in the original) " wherein we were born.' The plain meaning of this account seems to be, that the gift of tongues, on this occasion, at any rate, assumed the form of intelligible communications in foreign languages. But there is no evidence that the apostles then, or at any subsequent time, enjoyed the ability, supernaturally imparted, of speaking a variety of languages, with a view to the more adequate discharge of their apostolic functions, as has sometimes been inferred from the passage in the Acts. " Probably," it has been said, " in no age of the world has such a gift been less needed. The chief sphere of the apostles must have been within the Roman empire, and within that sphere, Greek or Latin, but especially Greek, must have been everywhere under stood. Even on the day of Pentecost, the speech of Peter, by which the first great con version was effected, seems to have been in Greek, which probably all the nations assem ',led would sufficiently understand; and the speaking of foreign dialects is nowhere alluded to by him as any part of the event which he is vindicating and describing."— Dean Stanley (Corinth. p. 250).