{"collection":"chr","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/chr/ecf/203/2030756.htm","path":"chr/ecf/203/2030756.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/203/2030756.htm","text":"17. I say nothing of the Greeks, since you boast of your knowledge of them, even to the extent of saying that, in attaching yourself to foreign literature, you have forgotten your own language. I am afraid that, according to the old proverbs, I might be like the pig teaching Minerva, and the man carrying fagots into the wood. I only wonder that, being as you are the Aristarchus 3028 of our time, you should have shewn ignorance of these matters which every boy knows. It is, no doubt, from your mind being fixed on the meaning of what you write, but partly also from your being so sharp-sighted for the manufacture of calumnies against me, that you despise the precepts of Grammarians and orators, that you make no attempt to set straight words which have got transposed when the sentence has become complicated, or to avoid some harsh collocation of consonants, or to escape from a style full of gaps. It would be ridiculous to point to one or two wounds when the whole body is enfeebled and broken. I will not select portions for criticism; it is for him to select any portion which is free from faults. He must have been ignorant even of the Socratic saying: \u201cKnow thyself.\u201d\nTo steer the ship the untaught landsman fears;\nTh\u2019 untrain\u2019d attendant dares not give the sick\nThe drastic southernwood. The healing drug\nThe leech alone prescribes. Th\u2019 artificer\nAlone the tools can wield. But poetry\nTrain\u2019d or untrain\u2019d we all at random write. 3029\nPossibly he will swear that he has never learned to read and write; I can easily believe that without an oath. Or perhaps he will take refuge in what the Apostle says of himself: \u201cThough I be rude in speech, yet not in knowledge.\u201d But his reason for saying this is plain. He had been trained in Hebrew learning and brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, whom, though he had attained apostolic rank, he was not ashamed to call his master; and he thought Greek eloquence of no account, or at all events, in his humility, he would not parade his knowledge of it. So that 3030 \u2018his preaching should stand not in the persuasive wisdom of words but in the power of the things signified.\u2019 He despised other men\u2019s riches since he was rich in his own. Still it was not to an illiterate man who stumbled in every sentence that Festus cried, as he stood before his judgment seat:\n\u201cPaul thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.\u201d 3031 You who can hardly do more than mutter in Latin, and who rather creep like a tortoise than walk, ought either to write in Greek, so that among those who are ignorant of Greek you may pass for one who knows a foreign tongue; or else, if you attempt to write Latin, you should first have a grammar-master, and flinch from the ferule, and begin again as an old scholar among children to learn the art of speaking. Even if a man is bursting with the wealth of Cr\u0153sus and Darius, letters will not follow the money-bag. They are the companions of toil and of labour, the associates of the fasting not of the full-fed, of self-mastery not of self-indulgence. 3032 It is p. 492 told of Demosthenes that he consumed more oil than wine, and that no workman ever shortened his nights as he did. He for the sake of enunciating the single letter Rho was willing to take a dog as his teacher; and yet you make it a crime in me that I took a man to teach me the Hebrew letters. This is the sort of wisdom which makes men remain unlearned: they do not choose to learn what they do not know. They forget the words of Horace:\nWhy through false shame do I choose ignorance,\nThat Book of Wisdom also which is read to us as the work of Solomon says: 3033 \u201cInto a malicious soul wisdom shall not enter, nor dwell in the body that is subject to sin. For the Holy Spirit of discipline 3034 will flee deceit and remove from thoughts which are without understanding.\u201d The case is different with those who only wish to be read by the vulgar, and do not care how they may offend the ears of the learned; and they despise the utterance of the poet which brands the forwardness of noisy ignorance.\n\u2019Twas you, I think, whose ignorance in the streets\nMurder\u2019d the wretched strain with creaking reed.\nIf you want such things, there are plenty of curly-pated fellows in every school who will sing you snatches of doggrel from Miletus; or you may go to the exhibition of the Bessi 3035 and see people shaking with laughter at the Pig\u2019s Testament, or at any jesters\u2019 entertainment where silly things of this kind are run after. There is not a day but you may see the dressed-up clown in the streets whacking the buttocks of some blockhead, or half-pulling out people\u2019s teeth with the scorpion which he twists round for them to bite. We need not wonder if the books of know-nothings find plenty of readers.\nA native of Samothrace who died at Cyprus b.c. 157. He was tutor to the children of Ptolemy Philometor, and was renowned as a rhetorician and a critic.\n491:3029 491:3030\n1 Cor. ii. 4. \u201cNot in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.\u201d Rev. Ver.\n491:3031 491:3032\nJerome often accuses Rufinus of self-indulgence. See esp. Letter cxxv, c. 18.\n492:3033 492:3034 492:3035\nA tribe of Thrace; probably troupes of them came to exhibit in Rome.","title":"Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Ser. II, Vol. III: Life a...","type":"page"}