After the besiegers, in the preceding incident, had exhausted their fruitless ingenuity, Jesus turns upon them with the question, “What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is he?” “The Son of David,” they feebly mutter. “How then doth David call him Lord? If David call him Lord, how is he his son?” That ended the controversy. The combined forces of theology and politics retired in confusion, evidently looking, as Dickens said of the portraits of the Dedlock family, “as if they did not know what to make of it.” They had lost the battle. One can imagine the evangelist who afterwards wrote the account, almost chuckling with inward satisfaction, as he recalled the scene and recorded the result: “And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day ask him any more questions.”
VII. Wit and Logic.
“Who would say that truth ought to stand disarmed against falsehood, or that the enemies of the faith shall be at liberty to frighten the faithful with hard words or jeer at them with lively sallies of wit, while the Christians ought never to write except with a coldness of style enough to set the reader asleep?”—Augustine.
WIT AND LOGIC.
“I was not gone far before I heard the sound of trumpets and alarms, which seemed to proclaim the march of an Enemy; and as I afterwards found was in reality what I apprehended it. There appeared at a great distance a very shining light, and in the midst of it a person of most beautiful aspect; her name was Truth. On her right hand, there marched a male deity, who bore several quivers on his shoulders, and grasped several arrows in his hand. His name was Wit.”—Addison.