“He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” 1 Cor. ii. 15.
The gift to which this high characteristic is ascribed by the Apostle is Christian Wisdom, and the Giver is God the Holy Ghost. “We speak wisdom,” he says, shortly before the text, “among them that are perfect, yet not the wisdom of this world … but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom.” And after making mention of the heavenly truths which Wisdom contemplates, he adds: “God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit … we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God.”
2. In a former verse St. Paul contrasts this divine Wisdom with Faith. “My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Howbeit, we speak wisdom among them that are perfect.” Faith, then, and Wisdom, are distinct, or even opposite gifts. Wisdom belongs to the perfect, and more especially to preachers of the Gospel; and Faith is the elementary grace which is required of all, especially of hearers. The two are introduced again in a later chapter of the same Epistle: “To one is given by the Spirit the word of Wisdom, to another the word of Knowledge by the same Spirit, to another Faith by the same Spirit.” Such are the two gifts which will be found to lie at the beginning and at the end of our new life, both intellectual in their nature, and both divinely imparted; Faith being an exercise of the Reason, so spontaneous, unconscious, and unargumentative, as to seem at first sight even to be a moral act, and Wisdom being that orderly and mature development of thought, which in earthly language goes by the name of science and philosophy.
3. In like manner, in the Services of this sacred Season, both these spiritual gifts are intimated, and both referred to the same heavenly source. The Collect virtually speaks of Faith, when it makes mention of Almighty God’s “teaching the hearts of His faithful people by the sending to them the light of His Holy Spirit;” and of the Wisdom of the perfect, when it prays God, that “by the same Spirit” we may “have a right judgment in all things.”
4. Again, in the Gospel for Whitsunday, the gift of Wisdom is surely implied in Christ’s promise, that the Comforter should teach the Apostles “all things,” and “bring all things to their remembrance whatsoever He had said unto them;” and in St. Paul’s exhortation, which we read yesterday, “In malice be children, but in understanding be men.” Again, a cultivation of the reasoning faculty, near akin to Philosophy or Wisdom, is surely implied in the precepts, of which we have heard, or shall hear, from the same Apostle and St. John today, about “proving all things,” and “holding fast that which is good,” and about “trying the spirits whether they are of God.”
5. Again, other parts of our Whitsun Services speak of exercises of Reason more akin to Faith, as being independent of processes of investigation or discussion. In Sunday’s Gospel our Lord tells us, “He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him … If a man love Me, he will keep My words, and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him.” This manifestation is doubtless made to us through our natural faculties; but who will maintain that even so far as it is addressed to our Reason, it comes to us in forms of argument? Again, in the Gospel for yesterday, “He that doeth truth cometh to the light,” and on the contrary, “Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil; for every one that doeth evil hateth the light.” Men do not choose light or darkness without Reason, but by an instinctive Reason, which is prior to argument and proof. And in the Gospel for today, “The sheep hear His voice, and He calleth His own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. The sheep follow Him, for they know His voice, and a stranger will they not follow, for they know not the voice of strangers.” The sheep could not tell how they knew the Good Shepherd; they had not analyzed their own impressions or cleared the grounds of their knowledge, yet doubtless grounds there were: they, however, acted spontaneously on a loving Faith.
6. In proceeding, then, as I shall now do, to inquire into the nature of Christian Wisdom, as a habit or faculty of mind distinct from Faith, the mature fruit of Reason, and nearly answering to what is meant by Philosophy, it must not be supposed that I am denying its spiritual nature or its divine origin. Almighty God influences us and works in us, through our minds, not without them or in spite of them; as at the fall we did not become other beings than we had been, but forfeited gifts which had been added to us on our creation, so under the Gospel we do not lose any part of the nature in which we are born, but regain what we have lost. We are what we were, and something more. And what is true of God’s dealings with our minds generally, is true in particular as regards our reasoning powers. His grace does not supersede, but uses them, and renews them by using. We gain Truth by reasoning, whether implicit or explicit, in a state of nature: we gain it in the same way in a state of grace. Both Faith and Wisdom, the elementary and the perfecting gift of the Holy Spirit, are intellectual habits, and involve the exercise of Reason, and may be examined and defined as any other power of the mind, and are subject to perversion and error, and may be fortified by rules, just as if they were not instruments in the hands of the Most High. It is no derogation, then, from the divine origin of Christian Wisdom, to treat it in its human aspect, to show what it consists in, and what are its counterfeits and perversions; to determine, for instance, that it is much the same as Philosophy, and that its perversions are such as love of system, theorizing, fancifulness, dogmatism, and bigotry,—as we shall be led to do. And now to enter upon our subject.