Hence Aristotle affirms, that man and the sun beget man. A noble doctrine of human philosophy, truly! Follow this highest effort of natural reason and it will bring you at length to the inevitable conclusion, that both man and the sun are eternal and infinite, as the same philosopher concluded the world itself was. For you will never find a man who was or is in himself either the beginning or the end of himself or of his race. Wherefore I myself am not able to discover by my own reason, either the beginning or the end of my Martin Luther, if I wish to understand either my beginning or my end, and not to believe it. For as to our possessing a formal knowledge or a knowledge of the forms of things, a cow possesses the same, which knows her own home, or, as the German proverb has it, "The cow sees and knows the gate." Here again the awfulness of the original fall and sin is revealed. For we are thereby rendered so destitute of true knowledge that we cannot of ourselves discover either our beginning or our end. After all the disputations therefore of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero and other philosophers of note, who have concluded from man's walking upright, while all other animals have their heads inclined downwards, looking towards the earth, and from his possessing the powers of intellect, that man is a singular animal and created to immortality according to all this argument and conclusion, what a poor, meagre and almost futile wisdom is this! The whole of it after all is derived from a contemplation of the form. And if you should still go on to argue upon the material of man, would not the same human reason compel you to conclude that this nature of ours is perishable, must be dissolved and cannot be immortal? What then is the conclusion of the whole matter? Let us learn it. It is, that the only true wisdom is found in the Holy Scriptures and in the Word of God. For the Word teaches us not only concerning the material, not only concerning the form of the whole creation, but also concerning the efficient and the final cause of all things; and concerning the beginning and the end of all things; WHO created them, _what_ he created and for what end he created that which he did create. Without the knowledge of the two causes, the efficient and the final, all our highest wisdom differs but little from that of the beasts, which use their eyes and their ears, but know nothing of the beginning or the end of what they see.