ence upon the mental effects of God's Spirit. We constantly oppose spiritual to intellectual activities, faith to reason, religion to science. The tradition of the historic Church is that science is religion, and that the highest spiritual activities are intellectual; that if our religion does not make us more sensible, it is a very poor religion; that, in fact, it is not merely futile to be silly, but that it is a sin to be silly. For religion is the working in our hearts of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom and of knowledge.
The fact that the Spirit of the Lord is thus described in Isaiah is for us Christians of secondary importance. If that were all, the second verse of the eleventh chapter of that book would rank but as one among the many glorious utterances in this greatest of prophetic treasuries. The significant value of the text in Christian theology is that, from the earliest times apparently indeed from the age of the Apocalypse itself[1]—it has been seized upon by the Church, and given a prominence above that of any other text in the Old Testament, and not
- ↑ See p. 36. Justin Martyr, about the year 155, refers to Is. 11 2-3, and applies the gifts, in his argument with the Jew, to Christ as the true Messiah. Following the Septuagint, he includes the first part of verse 3, and makes the number seven, Trypho, sect. 87: he may have had in mind the two instances of the work of the Spirit in Christ's growth—'strong, filled with wisdom' (Luke 2 40), and the quotation from Is. 61 1 in Luke 4 18—'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.'
