schools of the grammarians and professional speakers, whom
284 ON CATEcnisiyo. [chap. ix.
trine, which require to be narrated or discussed, whether they be matters relating to the faith, or questions bearing on the moral life, or others dealing with temptations, all these should be gone through in the manner which I have indicated, and ought therein to be referred to the more excellent way
(already noticed).^
Chap, ix.—0/ the method in which grammarians and professional spea1:er8 are to he dealt with.
13. There are also some who come from the commonest schools of the grammarians and professional speakers, whom you may not venture to reckon either among the uneducated or among those very learned classes whose minds have been exercised in questions of real magnitude. When such persons, therefore, who appear to be superior to the rest of mankind, so far as the art of speaking is concerned, approach you with the view of becoming Christians, it will be your duty in your communications with them, in a higher degree than in your dealings with those other illiterate hearers, to make it plain that they are to be diligently admonished to clothe themselves with Christian humihty, and learn not to despise individuals whom they may discover keeping themselves free from vices of conduct more carefully than from faults of language ; and also that they ought not to presume so much as to compare with a pure heart the practised tongue which they were accustomed even to put in preference. Lut above all, such persons should be taught to listen to the divine Scriptures, so that they may neither deem solid eloquence to be mean, merely because it is not inflated, nor suppose that the words or deeds of men, of which we read the accounts in those books, involved and covered as they are in carnal wrappings,^ are not to be drawn forth and unfolded with a view to an (adequate) understanding of them, but are to be taken merely according to the sound of the letter. And as to this same matter of the utility of the hidden meaning, the existence of which is the reason why they are called also mysteries, the power wielded by these intricacies of enigmatical nttcranccs in the way of sharpening our love for the truth, and slinking off the torpor
1 Cor. xii. ni. Sci' also above, § 9.
Cuiiiulibus inU'^uuKiitis iiivoluta atijue oi^crtx