Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Arnobius/Adversus Gentes/Book II/Chapter VI

6. But perhaps those seem to you weak-minded and silly, who even now are uniting all over the world, and joining together to assent with that readiness of belief at which you mock. What then? Do you alone, imbued with the true power of wisdom and understanding, see something wholly different and profound? Do you alone perceive that all these things are trifles? you alone, that those things are mere words and childish absurdities which we declare are about to come to us from the supreme Ruler? Whence, pray, has so much wisdom been given to you? whence so much subtlety and wit? Or from what scientific training have you been able to gain so much wisdom, to derive so much foresight? Because you are skilled in declining verbs and nouns by cases and tenses, and in avoiding barbarous words and expressions; because you have learned either to express yourselves in harmonious, and orderly, and fitly-disposed language, or to know when it is rude and unpolished; because you have stamped on your memory the Fornix of Lucilius, and Marsyas of Pomponius; because you know what the issues to be proposed in lawsuits are, how many kinds of cases there are, how many ways of pleading, what the genus is, what the species, by what methods an opposite is distinguished from a contrary,&#8212;do you therefore think that you know what is false, what true, what can or cannot be done, what is the nature of the lowest and highest? Have the well-known words never rung in your ears, that the wisdom of man is foolishness with God?