[30] S. John xii. 38-40. "They have blinded their eyes," &c. (See the place in the LXX.:) sc. ὁ λαὸς οὗτος.
[31] "Had the revelation of Christ been delayed till now, assuredly it would have been hard for us to recognize His Divinity.... We, of course, have in our turn counterbalancing advantages. (!) If we have lost that freshness of faith which would be the first (sic) to say to a poor carpenter,—Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,—yet we possess in the greater cultivation of our religious understanding, that which perhaps we ought not to be willing to give in exchange (!) ... They had not the same clearness of understanding as we; the same recognition that it is God and not the Devil who rules the World; the same power of discrimination between different kinds of truth.... Had our Lord come later, He would have come to mankind already beginning to stiffen into the fixedness of maturity.... The truth of His Divine Nature would not have been recognized." (pp. 24-5.)—Is this meant for bitter satire on the age we live in; or for disparagement of the Incarnate Word?... But in the face of such anticipations, the keenest satire of all is contained in the author's claim to a "religious understanding, cultivated" to a degree unknown to the best ages of the Church; as well as to surpassing "clearness of understanding," and "powers of discrimination." Lamentable in any quarter, how deplorable is such conceit in one who shews himself unacquainted with the first principles of Theological Science; and who puts forth an Essay on the Education of the World, which would have been discreditable to an advanced school-boy!
[32] Quite ineffectual, at the very close of this unhappy composition, as a set off to the compacted and often repeated asseverations of his earlier pages, is the amiable author's plaintive plea for "even the perverted use of the Bible;" adding,—"And meanwhile, how utterly impossible it would be in the manhood of the world to imagine any other instructor of mankind!" (p. 47.) It is one of the favourite devices of these seven writers, side by side with their most objectionable statements, to insert isolated passages of admitted truth,—and occasionally even of considerable beauty: which however are utterly meaningless and out of place where they stand; and (like the sentence above written,) powerless to undo the circumstantial wickedness of what went before. I repeat, that the words above-written are meaningless where they stand: for if Dr. Temple really means that it is "utterly impossible in the manhood of the world to imagine any other instructor of mankind" than the Bible,—what becomes of his Essay?
[33]παρατηρεῖσθε: i.e. "ye misobserve," "keep in a wrong way."
[34] Gal. iv. 1-10.
[35] Gal. iii. 24, 25.
[36] Gal. v. 1.
[37] 2 St. John v. 10, 11.
[38] Rom. viii. 21.
[39] It is presumed that the article in the Dict. of Antiquities will be held unexceptionable authority as to the office of the παιδαγωγός.—"Rex filio pædagogum constituit, et singulis diebus ad eum invisit, interrogans eum: Num comedit filius meus? num in scholam abiit? num ex scholâ rediit?"—Wetstein, in loc.—So Plato Lysis, p. 118.