Yet it is true that I described the change from childhood to manhood, as a change from ignorance to wisdom.  I did so, certainly; but yet, rare as knowledge is, wisdom is rarer; and knowledge, unhappily, can exist without wisdom, as wisdom can exist with a very inferior degree of knowledge.  We shall see this, if we consider what we mean by knowledge; and, without going into a more general definition of it, let us see what we mean by it here.  We mean by it, either a knowledge of points of scholarship, of grammar, and matters connected with grammar; or a knowledge of history and geography; or a knowledge of mathematics:  or, it may be, of natural history; or, if we use the term, “knowledge of the world,” then we mean, I think, a knowledge of points of manner and fashion; such a knowledge as may save us from exposing ourselves in trifling things, by awkwardness or inexperience.  Now the knowledge of none of these things brings us of necessity any nearer to real thoughtfulness, such as alone gives wisdom, than the knowledge of a well-contrived game.  Some of you, probably, well know that there are games from which chance is wholly excluded, and skill in which is only the result of much thought and calculation.  There is no doubt that the game of chess may properly be called an intellectual study; but why does it not, and cannot, make any man wise?  Because, in the first place, the calculations do but respect the movements of little pieces of wood or ivory, and not those of our own minds and hearts; and, again, they are calculations which have nothing to do whatever with our being better men, or worse, with our pleasing God or displeasing him.  And what is true of this game, is true no less of the highest calculations of Astronomy, of the profoundest researches into language; nay, what may seem stranger still, it is often true no less of the deepest study even of the actions and principles of man’s nature; and, strangest of all, it may be, and is often true, also, of the study of the very Scripture itself; and that, not only of the incidental points of Scripture, its antiquities, chronology, and history, but of its very most divine truths, of man’s justification and of God’s nature.  Here, indeed, we are considering about things where wisdom, so to speak, sits enshrined.  We are very near her, we see the place where she abides; but her very self we obtain not.  And why?—­but because, in the most solemn study, no less than in the lightest, our own moral state may be set apart from our consideration; we may be unconscious all the while of our great want; and forgetting our great business, to be reconciled to God, and to do his will:  for wisdom, to speak properly, is to us nothing else than the true answer to the Philippian jailor’s question, “What must I do to be saved?”