And not for signs in heaven above
Or earth below they look, Who know with John His smile of love,
With Peter His rebuke.
In joy of inward peace, or sense
Of sorrow over sin, He is His own best evidence,
His witness is within.3
ii. Greeks.
" Greeks seek after wisdom."
The wisdom of which St. Paul speaks appears to have been of two kinds — speculative philosophy and wisdom of words, i.e. eloquence. The Greeks had deified wisdom. They wanted the Divine intellectualized in a system eloquently giving account of the nature of the gods, the origin, course, and end of the universe. This people, with their inquisitive and subtle mind, would get at
1 J. H. Jowett.
2 Stopford Brooke's Life and Letters of Hie Rev. F. IF. llohcrtson, 73. 8 Whittier.
i CORINTHIANS i. 22-24 9
the essence of things. The man who will satisfy Greek expecta- tion will be, not a miracle -worker, but a Pythagoras or a Socrates of double power.
1. Next to the Jews there was no people in the world that St. Paul knew better than the Greeks. He had in his lifetime come much in contact with them. He had, like all other men, wondered at their genius. There was no feature more distinctive of the whole people than their intellectual aptitudes, which they never lost. Everywhere they kept strong hold of their national traditions. Their language remained through ages uncorrupt and unmutilated. Much of their theology and culture was gathered from the Homeric poems, which were the heirloom of the whole race. They excelled in all the fine arts. They were masters in every branch of literature. "The Greeks," above every other people, " sought after wisdom." There could be nothing equal to that description in perspicuity and appreciation of national character. For the Greeks from hoar antiquity had been seekers after wisdom.
2. The Greek asked for no sign; he cared nothing for the supernatural, he had ceased to believe in it. He believed only in nature ; he sought only for wisdom to understand himself and the world in which he lived ; he asked from Christ only light on those problems in external nature, or in himself, on which his subtle mind was ever working. He wanted a perfect philosophy, or, at least, a perfect morality, which could justify itself to his intellect by solving all those difficulties which beset all other philosophies and all other systems of morals. Could Christianity do this ? Could it tell him what was mind, and how it differed from matter ? * Could it tell him whether he was governed by fate or by free-will ? Could it tell him whence came evil ? If it could, he was willing to listen to it and to believe all that it could prove. But then for such teaching there was no need of miracles any more than there was for the teaching of geometry. All that was true in it he would receive on its own evidence, and he would receive nothing that did not so prove itself to be true.
3. From the earliest days of Christianity to our own, there have been those who, like the Greeks, demand a demonstration of religious truths not to the senses, but to the intellect, who ever
io POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD
seek to divest Christianity of all that is mysterious or super- natural and to reduce it, as much as possible, to a purely natural religion, to something that can be weighed and measured by the understanding, or that approves itself to the feelings; to something, in short, that is self-evident to the natural man.
If There is, in our day, a marvellous idolatry of talent ; it is a strange and a grievous thing to see how men bow down before genius and success. Draw the distinction sharp and firm between these two things — goodness is one thing, talent is another. It is an instructive fact that the Son of Man came not as a scribe, but as a poor working man. He was a teacher, but not a Eabbi. When once the idolatry of talent enters the Church, then fare- well to spirituality ; when men ask their teachers, not for that which will make them more humble and God-like, but for the excitement of an intellectual banquet, then farewell to Christian progress.1
If Artists have united with authors to strengthen this idolatry of intellect. One of the great pictures in the French Academy of Design assembles the immortals of all ages. Having erected a tribunal in the centre of the scene, Delaroche places Intellect upon the throne. And when the sons of genius are assembled about that glowing centre, all are seen to be great thinkers. There stand Democritus, a thinker about invisible atoms ; Euclid, a thinker about invisible lines and angles; Newton, a thinker about an invisible force named gravity ; La Place, a thinker about the invisible law that sweeps suns and stars forward towards an unseen goal. The artist also remembers the inventors whose useful thoughts blossom into engines and ships ; statesmen whose wise thoughts blossom into codes and constitutions; speakers whose true thoughts blossom into orations; and artists whose beautiful thoughts appear as pictures. At this assembly of the immortals great thinkers touch and jostle. But if the great minds are remembered, no chair is made ready for the great hearts. He who lingers long before this painting will believe that brain is king of the world ; that great thinkers are the sole architects of civilization ; that science is the only providence for the future; that God Himself is simply an infinite brain, an eternal logic engine, cold as steel, weaving endless ideas about life and art, about nature and man. But the throne of the universe is mercy and not marble ; the name of the world-ruler is Great Heart, rather than Crystalline Mind, and God is the Eternal Friend who pulsates out through His world those forms