lower than the greatest in the Christian scriptures. The instinct of Christianity picked out this single verse from the fifty-three Hebrew books, and set it in the forefront of its theology, accepting as the best description of the very Spirit of God these words which were originally used in the picture of the earthly rule of an inspired deliverer. The Church has taught consistently to simple and to learned that this expresses her faith in the Holy Spirit, that wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and reverence, these noble qualities, and nothing less, are the gifts of the Holy Ghost. And she, in the West, has repeated the enumeration of these gifts at the Confirmation of every humble little child, in the prayer which our English service has inherited from the Sarum rite, and which is at least as old as the Gelasian Sacramentary of the seventh century.[1]
Commentators naturally differ a little as to the exact force of the Hebrew words; and early Christian exegetists added 'Godliness', pietas. a rather vague word in this context, to the original six, in order to reach the sacred number, finding their justification in the Greek and Latin rendering of the next sentence 'and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord'.[2] Others,
