Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”
John 11:40
The Beginning of Wisdom
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
all who follow his precepts have good understanding.
To him belongs eternal praise.
Psalm 111:10
Can it then be said that the non-religious world is without wisdom?
Has it no Aristotle, no Socrates, no Tacitus, no Goethe, No Gibbon?
Let us understand what wisdom is. It is not any mere amount of knowledge
that constitutes wisdom. Appropriate knowledge is essential to wisdom.
A man who has not the knowledge appropriate to his position, who does
not know himself in his relation to God and to his fellow-men, who is
misinformed as to his duties, his dangers, his necessities, though he
may have written innumerable works of a most exalted character, yet is
he to be set down as a man without wisdom.
If you have learned to estimate things in some measure as God estimates
them, to desire what he offers, to relinquish what he forbids, and to
recognize the duties that he has appointed you, you are in the path of
wisdom, and the great men we have been speaking about are far behind you-
far from the narrow gate which you have entered. He only is wise, who can
call Christ the wisdom of God.
George Bowen (1816-1888)
From The Treasury of David by Charles H. Spurgeon P.12 of Classic Reflections
on the Wisdom of the Psalms
I Fear No Longer
But now let my God cry more loudly in my soul,
so that your truth may tell me, “No, that is
not the case; it is not true.
The primary teaching
is better in every respect.” I am undoubtedly more
ready today to forget the wanderings of Aeneas and
so forth than how to write or read. Curtains may
well hang at the entrance to schools of literature,
but they serve less to signal the prestige of elite
instruction than to conceal error.
Let not those buyers
and sellers of literary studies shout me down, my God,
as I confess to you according to my soul’s need, and
acquiesce as you chide me for those evil ways of mine
and bring me to love your good ways;
let them not shout
me down, for I fear no longer.
Saint Augustine (354-430)
the Confessions (Book 1 P. 26. 22)
The Works of Saint Augustine A Translation for the 21st Century
from the Augustinian Heritage Institute
