by the fear of God to seek the knowledge of His will, what He
CHAP, til] the steps TO AVISDOM. 39 liuno-er, and by the more obscure to stimulate our appetite.
For almost nothing is dug out of those obscure passages which may not be found set forth in the plainest language elsewhere.
Chap. vii.—Steps to wisdom: First, fear ; second, piety; third, Tcnowledge fourth, resolution; ffth, counsel; sixth, x>uriJication of heart ; seventh, stop or termination, loisdom.
9. First of all, then, it is necessary that we should be led by the fear of God to seek the knowledge of His will, what He commands us to desire and what to avoid. Now this fear will of necessity excite in us the thought of our mortality and of the death that is before us, and crucify all the motions of pride as if our flesh were nailed to the tree. Next it is necessary to have our hearts subdued by ^926^3/, and not to run in the face of Holy Scripture, whether when understood it strikes at some of our sins, or, when not understood, we feel as if we could be wiser and give better commands ourselves. We must rather think and believe that whatever is there written, even though it be hidden, is better and truer than anything we could devise by our own wisdom.
1 0. After these two steps of fear and piety, we come to the third step, knowledge, of which I have now undertaken to treat. For in this every earnest student of the Holy Scriptures exercises himself, to find nothing else in them but that God is to be loved for His ownsake, and our neighbour for God's sake ; and that God is to be loved with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the mind, and one's neighbour as one's self—that is, in such a way that all our love for our neighbour, like all our love for ourselves, should have reference to God.^ And on these two commandments I touched in the previous book when I was treating about things.^ It is necessary, then, that each man should first of all find in the Scriptures that he, through being entangled in the love of this world i.e. of temporal things—has been drawn far away from such a love for God and such a love for his neighbour as Scripture enjoins. Then that fear which leads him to think of the judgment of God, and that piety whicli gives him no option but to believe in and submit to the authority of Scripture, compel him to bewail his condition. For the knowledge of a good hope makes
Comp. Matt. xxii.