Article October 3, 1914 Issue

"Philosophy and vain deceit"

RICHARD STONE

In that wonderfully vivid description of the temptation in the wilderness, Milton in his "Paradise Regained" depicts "the evil one" as reminding Jesus that "all knowledge is not couched in Moses' law, ... or what the prophets wrote." Pointing to the wisdom of the Greeks, he minutely relates each school of their philosophy. The tempter then insinuates that if Jesus is to overthrow their wisdom, it is essential that he should be familiar with it, else, "How wilt thou reason with them, how refute their idolisms, traditions, paradoxes?" for, he argues, error can best be overcome by its own weapons. To these blandishments Jesus replies with crushing logic, that "he who receives light from above, from the fountain of light, no other doctrine needs, though granted true,"—that all such philosophies are false, little else than "dreams, conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm," and that whoever is unwise enough to seek true wisdom in such a medley of sophistries, finds it not.

It was to people impregnated with the Greek philosophy—that love of worldly wisdom which placed the pursuit of happiness in the pleasures of the senses and denied the providence of God—that Paul wrote his epistles. In these he frequently sounds the note of warning. He bade the Colossians to "beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit," and he besought the Ephesians that they should "walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened." It was not given to the Greeks alone to found a philosophy built upon the evidence of the material senses or upon mere intellectuality. All down the ages mankind have created philosophies based upon materiality, and thus erected a veritable tower of Babel having its foundations in sand.

Material philosophy has been tried in the scales of human experience and found wanting. It has been of no avail for rescuing men from sin, disease, and death, or of any value in showing the path to true and positive happiness, for the reason that such wisdom, being a mingling of good and evil, could never bring forth fruits wholly good. Despite past experience, mankind have sought escape from the direful effects of materiality by plunging into newer theories of the universe, until, finding the hopelessness of such pursuit, the world may very well cry with Job, "Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?"

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