Fond man, like a bought slave thou all the while
Dost but for others sweat and toil.
Cowley, The Shortness of Life and Uncertainty of Riches.
After we come once to view the seam or vein where the hidden treasure lies, we account all we possess besides as dross; for whose further assurance we alienate all our interest in the world, with as great willingness as good husbands do base tenements or hard-rented leases, to compass some goodly royalty offered them more than half for nothing.—Jackson, The Eternal Truth of the Scriptures, b. iv. c. 8.
| Idiot, | } |
| Idiotical. |
A word with a very interesting and instructive history, which, however, is only fully intelligible by a reference to the Greek. The ἰδιώτης or ‘idiot’ is first the private man as distinguished from the man sustaining a public office; then, inasmuch as public life was considered an absolutely necessary condition of man’s highest education, the untaught or mentally undeveloped, as distinguished from the educated; and only after it had run through these courses did ‘idiot’ come to signify what ἰδιώτης never did, the man whose mental powers are not merely unexercised but deficient, as distinguished from him in full possession of them. This is the only employment to which we now put the word; but examples of its earlier and more Greek uses are frequent in Jeremy Taylor and others. See my Synonyms of the N.T. § 79.
And here, again, their allegation out of Gregory the First and Damascene, That images be the laymen’s books, and that pictures are the Scripture of idiots and simple persons, is worthy to be considered.—Homilies; Against Perils of Idolatry.
It is clear, by Bellarmine’s confession, that S. Austin affirmed that the plain places of Scripture are sufficient to all laics, and all idiots or private persons.—Bishop Taylor, A Dissuasive from Popery, part ii. b. i. § 1.
Christ was received of idiots, of the vulgar people, and of the simpler sort, while He was rejected, despised, and persecuted even to death by the high priests, lawyers, scribes, doctors, and rabbies.—Blount, Philostratus, p. 237.
It [Scripture] speaks commonly according to vulgar apprehension, as when it tells of ‘the ends of the heaven;’ which now almost every idiot knows hath no ends at all.—John Smith, Select Discourses, vi., On Prophecy.