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9. Here, perhaps, some one inquires whether the authors whose
divinely-inspired writings constitute the canon, which carries with it
a most wholesome authority, are to be considered wise only, or
eloquent as well. A question which to me, and to those who think with
me, is very easily settled.
For where I understand these writers, it seems to me not only that
nothing can be wiser, but also that nothing can be more eloquent. And
I venture to affirm that all who truly understand what these writers
say, perceive at the same time that it could not have been properly
said in any other way. For as there is a kind of eloquence that is
more becoming in youth, and a kind that is more becoming in old age,
and nothing can be called eloquence if it be not suitable to the person
of the speaker, so there is a kind of eloquence that is becoming in men
who justly claim the highest authority, and who are evidently inspired
of God. With this eloquence they spoke; no other would have been
suitable for them; and this itself would be unsuitable in any other,
for it is in keeping with their character, while it mounts as far above
that of others (not from empty inflation, but from solid merit) as it
seems to fall below them. Where, however, I do not understand these
writers, though their eloquence is then less apparent, I have no
doubt but that it is of the same kind as that I do understand. The
very obscurity, too, of these divine and wholesome words was a
necessary element in eloquence of a kind that was designed to profit our
understandings, not only by the discovery of truth, but also by the
exercise of their powers.
10. I could, however, if I had time, show those men who cry up
their own form of language as superior to that of our authors (not
because of its majesty, but because of its inflation), that all those
powers and beauties of eloquence which they make their boast, are to be
found in the sacred writings which God in His goodness has provided to
mould our characters, and to guide us from this world of wickedness to
the blessed world above. But it is not the qualities which these
writers have in common with the heathen orators and poets that give me
such unspeakable delight in their eloquence; I am more struck with
admiration at the way in which, by an eloquence peculiarly their own,
they so use this eloquence of ours that it is not conspicuous either by
its presence or its absence: for it did not become them either to
condemn it or to make an ostentatious display of it; and if they had
shunned it, they would have done the former; if they had made it
prominent. they might have appeared to be doing the latter. And in
those passages where the learned do note its presence, the matters
spoken of are such, that the words in which they are put seem not so
much to be sought out by the speaker as spontaneously to suggest
themselves; as if wisdom were walking out of its house, that is, the
breast of the wise man, and eloquence, like an inseparable attendant,
followed it without being called for.
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