3. Far more precious than practical or intellectual ability is the gift of _moral_ wisdom, which Solomon so greatly appreciated but so imperfectly attained. Yet he felt that "wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom." The world gives that name to many higher and lower manifestations of capacity and attainment, but wisdom is in Scripture the one law of all true life. In that magnificent outburst of Semitic poetry, the twenty-eighth chapter of the Book of Job, after pointing out that there is such a thing as natural knowledge--that there is a vein for the silver, and ore of gold, and a place of sapphires, and reservoirs of subterranean fire--the writer asks: "But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?" After showing with marvellous power that it is beyond man's unaided search--that the depths and the seas say, "It is not in us," and destruction and death have but heard the fame thereof with their ears--he adds with one great crash of concluding music, "God understandeth the way thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof.... And unto man He said, _Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding_."[190] And again we read, "_The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge_."[191] The sated cynic of the Book of the Ecclesiastes, or one who had studied, not without dissatisfaction, his sad experience, adds, "_Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man_." And in answer to the question "_Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you?_" St. James, the Lord's brother, who had evidently been a deep student of the Sapiential literature, does not answer, "He who understands all mysteries," or, "He who speaks with the tongue of men or of angels," but, "Let him show out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom." Men whom the world has deemed wise have often fallen into utter infatuation, as it is written, "He taketh the wise in their own craftiness"; but heavenly wisdom may belong to the most ignorant and simplehearted. It is "first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, without partiality and without hypocrisy."