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just as his perception of beauty in literature and art declined, in proportion as he suffered his spirit of reverence towards these things to die.i
2. The deepest reverence arises from the recognition of God. If this universe of which we form a part is a thought of the Divine mind, a work of the Divine hand, a scene of Divine opera- tions, in which God is realizing, by slow degrees, a vast spiritual purpose, it is evident that no attempt to understand it can be successful which leaves this, its fundamental idea, out of account ; as well might one attempt to understand a picture while refusing to recognize that the artist had any purpose to express in painting it, or indeed that there was any artist at all. So much every one will admit. But if the universe is not the work of a Divine mind, or the effect of a Divine will ; if it is merely the working of a blind, irrational force, which realizes no end, because it has no end to realize; if we, the feeble outcome of a long, unthinking evolution, are the first creatures that ever thought, and the only creatures who now thinTc, in all the universe of Being ; it follows that of a universe so irrational there can be no true knowledge for rational beings, and of a scheme of things so unwise there can be no philosophy or wisdom. No person who reflects can fail to recognize this, and this is the truth which is asserted in the text. It is not necessary to maintain that without admitting God we cannot have knowledge of a certain number of empirical facts ; but that does not constitute a philosophy or a wisdom. It is necessary to maintain that without admitting God we cannot have any explanation of our knowledge, or any verification of it ; without admitting God our knowledge can never come to any roundness or completeness such as might justify us in calling it by the name of Wisdom.
^ True Wisdom must account for the worlds that sweep in'i space, and even for the lily of the field and the sparrow on thet housetop. True Wisdom is ultimately a philosophy of thingsA though it may be much more than this. We know that the New Testament makes Jesus Christ, as rightly apprehended, the explanation of the creation of the world, and of all the eternal activities of God, though the starting-point of this position is an ethical relation, and not a system of thought. This position is * E. F. Horton, The Book 0/ Proverbs^ 16,
204 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
already obscurely anticipated in the Hebrew idea of Wisdom, on which is made to rest the whole superstructure of the universe.^
3. If true wisdom is to be ours, the God that we acknowledge must be no mere idea or abstraction, but Jehovah, the God of revelation. It may be taken for granted that, so far as the intellect alone claims satisfaction, it is enough to posit the bare idea of God as the condition of all rational existence. But when men come to recognize themselves as spiritual beings, with concep- tions of right and wrong, with strong affections, with soaring aspirations, with ideas which lay hold of Eternity, they find them- selves quite incapable of being satisfied with the bare idea of God; the* soul within them pants and thirsts for a living God. An intellectual love of God might satisfy purely intellectual creatures ; but to meet the needs of man as he is, God must be a God that manifests His own personality, and does not leave Himself without a witness to His rational creatures. A wisdom, then, that is truly to appraise and rightly to guide the life of man, must start with the recognition of a God whose peculiar designa- tion is the Self-existent One, and who makes Himself known to man by that name ; that is, it must start with the " fear of the Lord."
(1) In building the temple of knowledge, this fear of the Lord must be the foundation-stone. Knowledge being the appre- hension of facts, and the application of them to life, cannot properly begin, or be based on a right foundation, without first apprehending and applying a fact which includes and which modifies all other facts whatever. The world has lived long enough to know that there is no such thing practically as getting at the knowledge of God through His works and ways — through the phenomena of nature, or the unfoldings of providence, or the operations of the human intellect. God is that which He has declared Himself to be; that which His Spirit has in and by man's spirit testified that He is. And this revelation of Himself standing recorded for all the world, it is mere idleness to suppose that we can by searching find Him out, or can place that great fact last, as an object of research and conclusion, which He has blazoned forth for us on the face of His written word. This then
1 J, Thorny
PROVERBS I. 7 205
must come first, unless we should have all our knowledge crippled and distorted.
^ A very clever man, a Bampton Lecturer, evidently writing with good and upright intention, sends me a Lecture in which he lays down the qualities he thinks necessary to make theological study fruitful. They are courage, patience, and sympathy. He omits one quality, in my opinion even more important than any of these, and that is reverence : without a great stock of reverence, mankind, as I believe, will go to the bad. I might add another omission : it is caution — a thing different from reverence, but an apt handmaid to it, and the proper counterpoise to the courage of which certainly there seems to be no lack.^