No, for comfort and hope in this matter we have to turn away from the Ancient Wisdom to the revealed Wisdom, Christ Jesus. It is He and He alone who practically forbids us to be hopeless about any one. A noble Roman in the time of the Punic Wars received an honourable recognition from the Senate because he had not in the darkest times despaired of the Republic. That is the kind of debt that we owe to the Saviour. He has not despaired of any human being; He will not let us despair. It is His peculiar power, tried and proved again and again, to turn the fool into the wise man. Observing the threefold distinction which is hidden under the word we have been examining, Christ is able to arouse the weak, fond, infatuated soul to a sense of its need. Could there be a better instance than that of the woman at the well,--a foolish creature living in conscious sin, yet full of specious religious talk? Did He not awake in her the thirst for the living water, and satisfy the craving which He had excited? Christ is able to transform the dull and heavy soul, that has suffered itself to be mastered by greed and petrified by selfishness. Was not this what He did to Zaccheus the publican? And even with that worst kind of fool, whose heart is withered up within him by reason of sin, and who has learnt to say in his heart that there is no God,[672] the Lord is not helpless. We do not see such an one in the pages of the New Testament, because the folly of Atheism was not among the follies of those times. But in our own day it is an experience by no means uncommon; when an avowed infidel comes under the power of the Gospel, Christ enters into him with the overwhelming conviction that there is a God; Christ shows him how it is sin which has thus obscured the elementary conviction of the human spirit; and, by the direct power of Christ, his heart comes to him again as that of a little child, while in the rapturous joy of believing he lays aside the folly which made him doubt along with the sin which made him unwilling to believe. FOOTNOTES: [638] Prov. x. 23. [639] Prov. x. 18. [640] Prov. xii. 23. [641] Prov. xiv. 33. [642] Prov. xiv. 7. [643] Prov. xvii. 16. [644] Prov. xxi. 20. [645] Prov. xvii. 21. [646] Prov. xxx. 22. [647] Prov. xxvii. 22. [648] Prov. xxii. 15. [649] Prov. xvi. 22. [650] Prov. xiv. 24. This seems simpler than supposing that the clause אִוֶּלֶת כְּמִילִים אִוֶּלֶת contains a play upon the possible double meaning of אִוֶּלֶת, which, though it yields an excellent sense,--"the power of fools is only folly," _i.e._, when they have power they turn it only to a foolish account (_cf._ xxvi. 1),--must be regarded as very obscure, especially seeing that we have no positive instance of אִוֶּלֶת as a derivative of אוּל in the sense of "power." [651] Prov. xxvii. 3. [652] Prov. xxix. 9. [653] Prov. xxiv. 9. [654] Prov. xix. 10. [655] This is reading לוֹ for לֹא, a constant source of confusion and interchange in Hebrew MSS.