ethics of Aristotle or with the Christian doctrine of salvation.  For if men think that knowledge by itself ever yet produced virtue in eager and unsated lives, they are either knaves or fools.  They will find that knowledge uncontrolled by a purified spirit and a reinforced will is already teaching men not how to be good, but how to sin the more boldly with the better chance of physical impunity.  “Philosophy,” says Black, “is a feeble antagonist before passion, because it does not supply an adequate motive for the conflict."[37] There were few men in the nineteenth century in whom knowledge and virtue were more profoundly and completely joined than in John Henry Newman.  But did that subtle intellect suffice? could it make the scholar into the saint?  Hear his own words: 

  “O Holy Lord, who with the children three
    Didst walk the piercing flame;
  Help, in those trial hours which, save to Thee,
    I dare not name;
  Nor let these quivering eyes and sickening heart
    Crumble to dust beneath the tempter’s dart.

  “Thou who didst once Thy life from Mary’s breast
    Renew from day to day;
  O might her smile, severely sweet, but rest
    On this frail clay! 
  Till I am Thine with my whole soul, and fear
    Not feel, a secret joy, that Hell is near.”

So, only when we include in the term “knowledge” understanding plus good will, is the humanist position true, and this, I suppose, is what Aristotle meant when he finally says, “Vice is consistent with knowledge of some kind, but it excludes knowledge in the full and proper sense of the word."[38]

[Footnote 37:  Culture and Restraint, p. 104.]

[Footnote 38:  Ethics, Book VII, ch. v, p. 215.]

Now, so finespun a discussion of intricate and psychological subtleties is mildly interesting presumably to middle-aged scholars, but I submit that a half truth that needs so much explanation and so many admissions before it can be made safe or actual, is a rather dangerous thing to offer to adolescence or to a congregation of average men and women.  It cannot sound to them very much like the good news of Jesus.  Culture is a precious thing, but no culture, without the help of divine grace and the responsive affection on our part which that grace induces, will ever knit men together in a kingdom of God, a spiritual society.  As long ago as the second century Celsus understood that.  He says in his polemic against Christianity, as quoted by Origen, “If any one suppose that it is possible that the people of Asia and Europe and Africa, Greeks and barbarians, should agree to follow one law, he is hopelessly ignorant."[39] Now, Celsus was proceeding on the assumption that Christianity was only another philosophy, a new intellectual system, and he was merely exposing the futility of all such unaided intellectualism.

[Footnote 39:  Origen, contra Celsum, VIII, p. 72.]