h Christ has brought us.

Now if we consult St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians, we shall find
the same state of things existing even in the first age of
Christianity. Even the Apostle speaks of those who were blind, or to
whom his Gospel was hid; and he elsewhere describes them, not as the
uneducated and dull of understanding, but as the wise of this world,
the scribe and the disputer. Even then, before the Apostle's prophecy
in the text was fulfilled, there were many who erred from the truth
even in the midst of light, and in spite of superior intellectual
endowments and acquirements.

Does not our Saviour Himself say the same thing, when He thanks His
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that He hath hid these things from
the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes?

Now it should not surprise us when men of acute and powerful
understandings more or less reject the Gospel, for this reason, that
the Christian revelation addresses itself to our hearts, to our love of
truth and goodness, our fear of sinning, and our desire to gain God's
favour, and quickness, sagacity, depth of thought, strength of mind,
power of comprehension, perception of the beautiful, power of language,
and the like, though they are excellent gifts, are clearly quite of a
different kind from these spiritual excellences--a man may have the one
without having the other. _This_, then, is the plain reason why able,
or again why learned men are so often defective Christians, because
there is no necessary connexion between faith and ability, because
faith is one thing and ability is another; because ability of mind is a
_gift_, and faith is a _grace_. Who would ever argue that a man could,
like Samson, conquer lions or throw down the gates of a city, because
he was able, or accomplished, or experienced in the business of life?
Who would ever argue that a man could see because he could hear, or run
with the swift because he had "the tongue of the learned[1]"? These
gifts are different in kind. In like manner, powers of mind and
religious principles and feelings are distinct gifts; and as all the
highest spiritual excellence, humility, firmness, patience, would never
enable a man to read an unknown tongue, or to enter into the depths of
science, so all the most brilliant mental endowments, wit, or
imagination, or penetration, or depth, will never of themselves make us
wise in religion. And as we should fairly and justly deride the savage
w