true happiness of man; and, not being able to agree upon any certainty about it, they could not possibly but conclude, if they judged impartially, that all their enquiries were, in the end, but vain and fruitless; the consequence of which must be not only an acknowledgment of the weakness of all human wisdom, but likewise an open passage hereby made, for the letting in those beams of light, which the glorious sunshine of the Gospel then brought into the world, by revealing those hidden truths, which they had so long before been labouring to discover, and fixing the general happiness of mankind beyond all controversy and dispute.  And therefore the providence of God wisely suffered men of deep genius and learning then to arise, who should search into the truth of the Gospel now made known, and canvass its doctrines with all the subtilty and knowledge they were masters of, and in the end freely acknowledge that to be the true wisdom only “which cometh from above.” (James, iii. 15, 16, 17.)

However, to make a further enquiry into the truth of this observation, I doubt not but there is reason to think that a great many of those encomiums given to ancient philosophers are taken upon trust, and by a sort of men who are not very likely to be at the pains of an enquiry that would employ so much time and thinking.  For the usual ends why men affect this kind of discourse, appear generally to be either out of ostentation, that they may pass upon the world for persons of great knowledge and observation; or, what is worse, there are some who highly exalt the wisdom of those Gentile sages, thereby obliquely to glance at and traduce Divine Revelation, and more especially that of the Gospel; for the consequence they would have us draw is this:  That, since those ancient philosophers rose to a greater pitch of wisdom and virtue than was ever known among Christians, and all this purely upon the strength of their own reason and liberty of thinking, therefore it must follow, that either all Revelation is false, or, what is worse, that it has depraved the nature of man, and left him worse than it found him.

But this high opinion of heathen wisdom is not very ancient in the world, nor at all countenanced from primitive times:  Our Saviour had but a low esteem of it, as appears by His treatment of the Pharisees and Sadducees, who followed the doctrines of Plato and Epicurus.  St Paul likewise, who was well versed in all the Grecian literature, seems very much to despise their philosophy, as we find in his writings, cautioning the Colossians to “beware lest any man spoil them through philosophy and vain deceit.”  And, in another place, he advises Timothy to “avoid profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science, falsely so called;” that is, not to introduce into the Christian doctrine the janglings of those vain philosophers, which they would pass upon the world for science.  And the reasons he gives are, first, That those who professed them did err concerning the faith: