For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.....For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man strength.
WHEN A MAN who had been very unhappy in marriage immediately remarried
after the death of his wife, Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer and man of
letters, described his act as "the triumph of hope over experience."
Johnson was easily amused or inflamed by his own and others’
foibles, and he could express either sentiment with elegance, biting wit and
devastating sarcasm. He was greatly to
be feared as an opponent in an argument.
Once when insulted, he replied, "A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse, and make him wince; but one is
but an insect, and the other a horse still." After an evening of conversation marked by
spirited debate and repartee, Johnson remarked to Boswell, his biographer, that
the conversation had been good. Boswell agreed, and said, "Yes, Sir; you tossed and gored several
persons."
But Johnson’s sharpest jabs were
directed at those skeptics who ridiculed the Christian faith he so cherished. The
18th century, like the 20th was a time when intellectuals
and aesthetes treated the faith with contempt.
Joseph Butler said it was "an
agreed point among people of discernment," that the faith was worthy
only "as a principle subject of
mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for so long having
interrupted the pleasures of the world." Of these skeptics, Johnson
wrote, "Truth…is a cow, which will yield
such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull."
But the man with the proud and formidable intellect before people was a child before God. His great mind was humble before a greater God.
Johnson’s prayers reveal a man with a deep, even tortured
sense of his own sinfulness. Trust in God’s mercy did not come easily to
Johnson, but it came, and he seemed never to be less than grateful and humbled
that it did.
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)
Submitted by:
Playwright Janet Irene Thomas
Founder/CEO
Bible Stories Theatre of
Fine & Performing Arts
No comments:
Post a Comment