It was a saying of Pope Pius the Second, that, "Common men should esteem learning as silver, noblemen value it as gold, and princes prize it as jewels." The uses of learning are seen in every thing that is not itself useless.[25] It cannot be overrated, but where it is perverted; and whenever that occurs, the remedy is to be sought by opposing learning to learning, till the truth is manifest, and that which is reprehensible, is made to appear so.
23.

I have said, learning cannot be overrated, but where it is perverted.
But men may differ in their notions of what learning is; and, consequently, of what is, or is not, a perversion of it.

And so far as this point may have reference to theology, and the things of God, it would seem that the Spirit of God alone can fully show us its bearings.

If the illumination of the Spirit is necessary to an understanding and a reception of scriptural truth, is it not by an inference more erudite than reasonable, that some great men have presumed to limit to a verbal medium the communications of Him who is everywhere His own witness, and who still gives to His own holy oracles all their peculiar significance and authority?
Some seem to think the Almighty has never given to men any notion of Himself, except by words.
"Many ideas," says the celebrated Edmund Burke, "have never been at all presented to the senses of any men _but by words_, as God,[26] angels, devils, heaven, and hell, all of which have however a great influence over the passions."-- _On the Sublime and [the] Beautiful_, p.97.That God can never reveal facts or truths except by words, is a position with which I am by no means satisfied.

Of the great truths of Christianity, Dr.Wayland, in his Elements of Moral Science, repeatedly avers, "All these being _facts_, can never be known, except _by language_, that is, by revelation."-- _First Edition_, p.132.