Wisdom
1 THE Seven Deadly Sins ’ formed the theme of a former volume of this series, and it seems natural to follow up that course with another on ‘The Seven Cardinal Virtues.’ The idea of the seven deadly sins is, that among the innumerable sins of which human beings may be guilty there are seven of peculiar virulence, from which all the rest can be derived; and, in the same way, the idea of the seven cardinal virtues is, that among the countless excellences with which human character may be adorned there are seven which overtop the rest, and from which all the rest are derivable. The adjective ‘cardinal’ refers especially to this latter point: it A signifies that these are the virtues on which all others hinge. For instance, in the one with which this first chapter will be occupied — wisdom — six virtues are included according to one ancient authority, and no fewer than ten according to another.
The idea of cardinal virtues is an exceedingly old one. It occurs in Plato and Aristotle, and from these famous philosophers it descended to the Greek philosophical schools. From the Greeks it passed to the Romans, being prominent in the writings of Cicero; and from them it passed to the Fathers of the Church.
The Greeks, however, only counted four cardinal virtues — wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. According to them, these were the four sides of a perfectly symmetrical character, and the man who possessed them could stand foursquare to all the winds that blow. In the Old Testament Apocrypha these four are also mentioned, and a Jewish writer of the time of our Lord, Philo of Alexandria, compares them to the four rivers that watered the garden of Eden — so do these fertilise and adorn human nature. Christianity, however, introduced a nomenclature as well as a conception of virtue of its own. Many virtues are mentioned in the New Testament, but there are three which occur constantly, as comprehending in themselves the whole of Christian character — namely, faith, hope and charity.
When the Fathers of the Church began to build their systems of dogma, of course they selected the stones out of the quarry of the Bible; but they were also powerfully under the influence of Greek philosophy, especially of Aristotle; and, in constructing an ethical system, what they did was to take the triad of virtues from the New Testament and add to it the quartette derived from philosophy, and thus there emerged the heptad which we are to discuss in the following pages. Perhaps in thus combining things having diverse origins they did not sufficiently consider whether the old virtues were not, to some extent, identical with the new; but, for practical purposes, no great harm is done if a bit of the ground, here and there, is gone over twice; and it is of distinct advantage to be reminded that Christian character has a natural foundation, though, of course, even the heathen virtues are modified when they appear in the mosaic of Christian character.
Sometimes the name of Cardinal Virtues is restricted to the four virtues of the pre-Christian philosophers, whereas the other three are named the Christian or the Theological Virtues; but certainly the latter are cardinal also — that is, hinge-virtues — and it is convenient to have a single adjective for designating the whole seven.
We begin our study of the seven virtues by treating of
Wisdom, and I shall show that it is, first, a Vision of the Ideal; secondly, the Finding of the Way; and thirdly, a Lesson to be Learnt.
I. — A VISION OF THE IDEAL
Wisdom is the foremost of the virtues. It is the lampbearer showing the way to the rest. Its principal business is to descry the goal to which they should all strive, and the point to which the whole course of life should tend.
When Thomas Carlyle was an old man, he said to some one, that he was often pondering the first question of theShorterCatechism, ‘What is the chief end of man? ’ with its wonderful answer, ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.’ Every Scotsman has known this question and answer ever since he can remember; but few may have reflected on the reason why this should be the first question. It is the first because it is taken for granted that the foremost inquiry of a rational being will be about the purpose of its own existence. In reality, this is often the last question rather than the first. Still it is a sublime fact that the first seed of thought dropped into the mind of a whole nation should be a question like this, which tends to make those to whom it is addressed ponder on the purpose of life. Why have I been born? Why am I alive? Why should I wish to go on living? These are the thoughts suggested to the mind by this first question of the catechism, and it is in thoughts like these that wisdom has its birth.
That which in the old language of the catechism is called ‘the chief end,’ is exactly the same as in modern language we call ’ the ideal ‘; and every modern mind can appreciate the importance of the question, ‘What is man’s ideal?’ for no belief has more complete possession of the modern mind than the necessity of ideals, and the maxim is common that, if you wish to find out a man’s moral worth, you have to find out what his ideal is.
Perhaps it might be said of many men that they have no ideal. And this is their condemnation. They have no object in life; they have never reflected why they are alive; their course is determined, not by their own choice, but by the blind forces of appetite within and of conventionality without. Such may truly be said to be dead whilst they live; for surely in such a vast and perilous enterprise as the voyage of life the first duty of every one who claims to be a man is to be aware where he is going. But, from another point of view, it may be said that every human being has his own ideal, whether he is aware of it or not. In every mind, consciously or unconsciously, there forms itself by degrees some supreme desire to which the thoughts are ever tending and towards the attainment of which the endeavours are ever set. It may be pleasure or success, or some special form of one or other of these. The drunkard is not aware of the hold his vice has on him, but drink is the object to which his reveries and designs are ever bent. The miser does not know himself to be the slave of money, but it absorbs his thoughts by day and his dreams by night. The woman of the world would not confess to herself that social advancement is her idol, but year by year the passion for it burns in her blood and determines her conduct. In this sense ideals are innumerable, and it is by their crossing and clashing, their vehemence and urgency,that the myriad-coloured spectacle of existence is produced. But they are, for the most part, unconscious, or, at least, unavowed.
The ideal of the first answer of the Shorter Catechism is a very high one — ‘to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.’ But, if we are to have a conscious and avowed ideal, how can we pitch it lower? Can we be satisfied without having the approval of God in this life and the prospect of spending our eternity with Him in the life to come? You may alter the name of the ideal. Many in our day would prefer Christ’s own name for it — ‘the Kingdom of God ‘; others might call it Welfare, or Blessedness, or Perfection; but the name signifies little; the essential thing is that we should know and avow what we intend to be and to do in this world, and in which port we intend to arrive when the voyage is finished. This is wisdom.
II. — THE FINDING OF THE WAY
Wisdom is concerned not only with the goal but the way to it; not only with the end but the means for attaining it; not only with the ideal but the actual. A pilot guiding a ship up a river in the dark sees, afar off, the shining light which marks his destination; but, if he is to arrive there, he has to mark a hundred lesser lights by which his course from point to point is indicated; and, if he neglected these, his ship would be aground long before he was half-way up the channel. So, suppose a man has chosen the goal indicated in the answer to the first question of the Shorter Catechism as his own, this supreme purpose includes many subordinate purposes — such as the development of his character, the discharge of his duty as a citizen, of his duty as a member of the church, of his duty in the family, his success in business, and so on. In fact, as the pilot has to be watchful at every bend of the course, at every encounter with a passing ship, and at every change in the state of the tide, so has the wise man to choose his path every day and every hour. He has to compare and to weigh and to judge; he has to appropriate the good and reject the bad; he has to discern what will help and what will hinder; and he has to pitch upon the means that will take him, not only to the ultimate end, but to the several halting-places by the way.
The Latin name for the virtue which the Greeks called wisdom is Prudence, and this change is characteristic. In the process of passing from the one ancient language to the other, ideas frequently lost something of their loftiness and delicacy. The Romans were a practical people, and they aimed low. Taking for granted that the end of life consisted in getting-on, they restricted the task of wisdom to the means of attaining it. Such a debased wisdom has never died out of the world, and Bunyan has embodied its characteristics in Mr. Worldly Wise man. Yet there is a prudence which is not ignoble, but an essential part of wisdom: if we would reach the end — even the highest end — we must use the means.
We must know the facts of the world. Facts are stubborn things; and we may make them either our friends or our foes, as fire may either be a devouring element or the force that carries us and our burdens at the rate of sixty miles an hour, and as electricity may either be death-dealing lightning or the Mercury to carry our messages round the globe. We may set nature up against us, or we may convert it into a friend and helper, and wisdom consists in doing the latter. Still more is it displayed in dealing with human nature. We have to realise the purpose of our life, not in a vacuum or a solitude, but in a world of men and women, and every one of those we encounter may either further our aim or retard it. Every human heart is a mystery, and human nature is a great deep. In nothing is wisdom more displayed than in knowing men and women, and in so treating them that they may favour our advance instead of opposing it.
In one word, we must know and obey the laws. On all objects and on all events the laws are written in hieroglyphics which the wise man can decipher but the fool misreads or does not see at all. Not only are there a narrow road and a broad road to be chosen once for all, but at every step there are a right and a wrong, and a choice has to be made. Conscience within and God above whisper, ‘This is the way: walk ye in it ‘; and blessed is he who thereupon walks straight forward, even though at the moment it seems to be into the jaws of hell; but, if, when reason and conscience and God are saying, ‘This way! ’ a man believes he is going to happiness by walking in the opposite direction, that man is a fool.
III. — A LESSON TO BE LEARNT
It was a question discussed of old in the philosophical schools of Greece, whether wisdom can be taught. There is more of an intellectual element in it than in the other virtues, and wisdom has sometimes been so conceived as to make it the peculiar property of men of talent or genius. Nor can it be denied that some natures are from birth more akin to it than others. Who would deny Plato’s gift of intuition into the laws of the moral universe or Shakespeare’s instinctive discernment of human nature? But, if wisdom consist in the choice of the true end of life and in the use of those means for attaining it placed by Providence at our disposal, then must it be the privilege and the duty of every child of Adam, for not one is intended or doomed beforehand to miss the end; and, therefore, it must be capable of being acquired.
How, then, is wisdom to be
obtained?
Partly by precept. There have been many wise men in the world before us, and vast stores of wisdom have been accumulated. These are to be found partly in the tradition that comes down to us by means of speech, as, for instance, in the proverbs which fly from mouth to mouth and descend from parent to child. These ’ maxims hewn from life,’ are the concentrated essence of a nation’s wisdom, and there is no nation which does not possess proverbs of its own. Our own nation is specially rich in them; and it is one mark of a wise man to annex these spontaneously and to speak in proverbs. Then, the stores of the world’s wisdom have been largely garnered in books, and, although a fool may read hundreds of these without becoming wise, any one with the germs of wisdom in him will grow wiser by means of books, if he chooses them well. A book like Bacon’s Essays shows how much wisdom can be packed into a hundred pages; and sometimes a poet, like Burns in his ‘Letter to a Young Friend, can distil the essence of the wisdom of an entire people into a few lines. In the Apocrypha there is a book entitled the Book of Wisdom, and the name is not undeserved; but it might be more justly applied to such a book as Proverbs or to the Bible as a whole. Several books of the Old Testament are spoken of sometimes as the Wisdom Literature, because they frequently deal by name with this subject; they are poetical books; but the prophetical books are in a still higher sense a Wisdom Literature; and even these pale before the oracles of our Lord and His apostles in the New Testament. Any one who aims at wisdom should take as his motto the verse in the first chapter of Joshua, only applying it to the whole Bible, ‘This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein; for then shalt thou make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.’
Secondly, wisdom is learned by practice. It is, as I have said, partly an intellectual virtue; but it consists much less in knowing than in doing. It is slowly accumulated by experience, and, like the pearl which forms where the bivalve has been wounded, it frequently springs from pain and misfortune. Other virtues shine most attractively in youth, but wisdom is the special ornament of old age; and it compensates for the drawbacks of this period of life.
Best of all is wisdom to be
learned through imitation. ‘He
that walketh with wise men shall
be wise,’ says the Book of Pro-B verbs, ‘but a companion of fools shall smart for it.’ It is not, indeed, so easy as such advices might imply to get into the company of the wise: they have their own friends and companions, and may be jealous of intrusion on their privacy and on their time; a wise man might be making himself a companion of fools if he kept company with us; and we must be prepared to pass through the ordeal of a searching inspection. But there is, at least, One who will not cast us out; and His friendship is more certain to make us wise than that of any other. One of the names of the Saviour is Wisdom, and He, it is said in Holy Scripture, is made of God unto us wisdom. He places no bounds to the intimacy we may seek with Him; and, if we are thus made wise unto salvation, there is little fear but we shall be welcome to other wise companionship even in this world, while in the world to come we may reckon on a humble place in that society of which it has been written, ‘They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.’