Frederic Farrar

Frederic William Farrar (Bombay, 7 August 1831 – Canterbury, 22 March 1903), often known as Dean Farrar, was a theological writer.

Quotes

• No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted words "failure" and "success." and measure them by the eternal, not by the earthly standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be preeminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross — was that a failure? Nay, my brethren.it was the death of Him who lived that we might follow His footsteps, it was the life, it was the death of the Son of God.
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 113.

• Fifty years ago, few would have believed that Dutch, and Russian, and Icelandic, and Greek, and Latin, and Persian, and Mahratti, and French, and English, were all indubitable developments from one and the same original tongue, and that the common ancestors of the nations who speak them were – in times that may almost be called historical – in times, at any rate, the reality of which can be rigidly tested by the microscope and the spectrum analysis of Philology – were living together as an undivided family in the same pastoral tents. In the present day, no one doubts the fact, except a few intrepid theologians.
• When we look at the table which is before us [showing the branches of the Indo- European language family], [ . . . ] it is but a concise statement of the astonishing truth, that we Europeans, together with the Persians and Hindoos, however wide may be the apparent and superficial differences between us, are, nevertheless, members of a close and common brotherhood in the great families of nations. First westward and northward, afterwards eastward and southward, the Aryans extended; they forgot the rock from whence they were hewn, and the hole of the pit whence they were digged: they became wholly ignorant of their mutual relationship; and when, in their various emigrations, they met each other – like the lion-whelps of a common lair – they met each other no longer as brothers but as foes: yet brothers they were; and now, at least, the science of language has restored to them the knowledge of this unsuspected truth.
• then, indeed, the Hindoos no less than ourselves would have recognized the bond of unity between us because of the common ancestors from whose loins we both alike are sprung, and we no less than they should have seen that in coming to Hindostan with our advanced civilization, we were returning home with splendid gifts to visit a member of one common family, and that the meeting between us was but the meeting of Esau and Jacob after long years of separation, – who met each other with mutual affection and the kiss of peace, although from the womb it had been prophesied respecting them that ‘the elder should serve the younger.’
  • Farrar, F.W. (1878) Language and languages, being “Chapters on Language” and “Families of speech”, London: Longmans, Green & Co. quoted in Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (Routledge Studies in the History of Linguistics) by Christopher Hutton

External links

• Works by Frederic William Farrar at Internet Archive
• Works by Frederic William Farrar at Project Gutenberg