'Strengthen them, we beseech thee, O Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter; and daily increase in them thy manifold gifts of grace; the spirit of wisdom and understanding; the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength; the spirit of knowledge, and true godliness; and fill them, O Lord, with the spirit of thy holy fear, now and for ever'.
In all versions, the fear of God is, by the use of the special verb 'fill them', taken as a general quality pervading all the rest, and thus the construction of the original text in Isaiah is never quite lost sight of. It is understood as the final grace—to secure, it would seem, against pride the possessor of six such princely virtues.
Thus are the mental gifts exalted in the strongest possible contrast to our modern custom of opposing 'mental' to 'spiritual'. The mental qualities are spiritual: art is as spiritual as holiness, and science is as spiritual as worship. Yet how people speak of 'a really spiritual' man, sometimes meaning nothing more than a very crass person just saved by a pious disposition; and how in certain circles do they argue about the profound distinction between mental healing and spiritual healing. There is no such distinction; but there is a distinction between good and bad; and spiritual evil is the worst of all because it is a corruption of the best.
This exaltation of the intellect and will was deliberate in the Church, and was well understood in the Middle Ages—not only in the progressive
