flOOK L] THE LEARNING OF THE EARLY FATHERS. 57 



our hemisphere. 11 Again, what concerns the generation oi 

 living creatures, he says, &quot;Annon sicut lac mulsisti me. et 

 sicut caseum coagulasti meT x and touching mineral subjects, 

 &quot; Habet argentum venarum suarum principia, et auro locus 

 est, in quo conflatur ; ferrum do terra tollitur, et lapis 

 Rolutus calore in ses vertitur,&quot;y and so forward in the same 

 chapter. 



Nor did the dispensation of God vary in the times after 

 oii7 Saviour, who himself first showed his power to subdue 

 ignorance, by conferring with the priests and doctors of the 

 law, before he showed his power to subdue nature by miracles. 

 And the coming of the Holy Spirit was chiefly expressed in 

 the gift of tongues, which are but the conveyance of know 

 ledge. 



So in the election of those instruments it pleased God to 

 use for planting the faith, though at first he employed per 

 sons altogether unlearned, otherwise than by inspiration, the 

 more evidently to declare his immediate working, and to 

 humble all human wisdom or knowledge, yet in the next 

 succession he sent out his divine truth into the world, at 

 tended with other parts of learning as with servants or hand 

 maids ; thus St. Paul, who was the only learned amongst the 

 apostles, had his pen most employed in the writings of the 

 New Testament. 



Again, we find that many of the ancient bishops and&quot; 1 

 fathers of the Church were well versed in all the learning 

 of the heathens, insomuch that the edict of the Emperor \ 

 Julian prohibiting Christians the schools and exercises, was 

 accounted a more pernicious engine against the faith than all J 

 the sanguinary persecutions of his predecessors. 2 Neither 

 could Gregory the First, bishop of Rome, ever obtain the 

 opinion of devotion even among the pious, for designing, 

 though otherwise an excellent person, to extinguish the 

 memory of heathen antiquity. 4 But it was the Christian 



w It is not true that all the southern stars are invisible in our hemi 

 sphere. The text applies only to those whose southern declination it 

 greater than the elevation ot the equator over their part of the horizon, 

 or, which is the same thing, than the complement of the place s lati 

 tude. Ed. * x. 10. r xxviiL 1. 



Epist. ad Jamblic. Gibbon, voL ii. c. 28. 



Gibbon, vol. iv. o. 45. 



