is, according to the anthropology of the Bible, as incon- gruous, as that one part of the soul should be happy and another miserable, one faculty saved and another lost.
Another principle nearly allied to the former is the moral and spiritual excellence of truth. Truth is not merely speculative, the object of cognition. It has moral beauty. In scriptural language, therefore, know- ledge includes love; wisdom includes goodness; folly includes sin; the wise are holy, fools are wicked. Truth and holiness are united as light and heat in the same ray. There cannot be the one without the other. To know God is eternal life ; to be without the know- ledge of God is to be utterly depraved. Saints are the children of light ; the wicked are the children of dark- ness. To be enlightened is to be renewed; to be blinded is to be reprobated. Such is the constant representation of Scripture.
The νοῦς, mind, therefore, in the passage before us, does not refer to the intellect to the exclusion of the feelings, nor to the feelings to the exclusion of the intellect. It includes both; the reason, the under- standing, the conscience, the affections are all compre- hended by the term. Sometimes one and sometimes another of these modes of spiritual activity is specially referred to, but in the present case the whole soul is intended. The word ματαιότης, vanity, according to the scriptural usage just referred to, includes moral as well as intellectual worthlessness, or fatuity. It is of all that is comprehended under the word νοῦς, the
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understanding and the heart, that this vanity is pre- dicated. Every thing included in the following verses respecting the blindness and depravity of the heathen is therefore comprehended in the word vanity.
V.18. Having the understanding darkened, being ahenated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. This verse at once explains and confirms the preceding statement. The heathen walk in vanity, i. e. in intel- lectual and moral darkness, because their understand- ing is darkened, and because they are alienated from the life of God.
The word διάνοια, understanding, in the first clause, means ὦ thinking through ; the mind (quatenus intelli- git, appetit et sentit) as opposed to the body; an act of the mind, a thought, purpose, or disposition ; the intelligence as opposed to the feelings. We are re- quired to love God, ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ διανοίᾳ, with the whole nvind ; men are said to be enemies, τῇ διανοίᾳ, Col. 1, 21, as to their state of mind, and proud τῇ διανοίᾳ τῆς καρδίας αὐτῶν. The apostle Peter exhorts us “to gird up the loins of the mind ;” and speaks of our “ pure mind.” And the apostle John says: ‘“ God has given us dvavoiay that we may know.” ‘The word is opposed to σάρξ in Eph. 2, 8, and to καρδία in Matt. 22, 37, Heb. 8,10 and elsewhere. It depends therefore on the connection whether the word is to be understood of the whole soul, or of the intelligence, or of the disposition. In this case it means the intelligence ; because it is dis-