BOOK t] THE LEAHKlKa OF THE EAllLY FATHERS. 67 



our liemispliere.'^ Again, what concerns the generation ol 

 living creatures, he says, " Annon sicut lac mulsisti me, et 

 sicut caseum coagulasti me?"^ and touching mineral subjects, 

 " Habet argentum venarum suaruih principia, et auro locus 

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

 flolutus calore in ses vertitur,"y and so forward in the same 

 cliapter. 



Nor did the dispensation of God vary in the times after 

 OUT Saviour, who himself first showed his power to subdue 

 igiiorance, 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 

 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 

 the sanguinary persecutions of his predecessors.'' 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 extinguisli the 

 memory of heathen antiquity.* But it was the Christian 



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

 sphere. The text applies only to those wliose southern declination ia 

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

 or, which is the same thing, than the complement of the place's Iftti* 

 tude. Ed. » X. 10. r xxviii. 1, 



■ Epist. ad Jamblic. Gibbon, toL ii. c. 2$. 



• Gibbon, vol. iv. c. 45. 



