Unsanctified Education
Homiletic Monthly
2 Timothy 3:7
Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.


There is a right and wrong way of looking at everything. As a rule, whatever is most valuable in its use is most harmful in its abuse. The keener the surgeon's knife, the more serviceable it is in skilled hands, but the more dangerous in hands unskilled. Education — learning — is of the utmost value, rightly acquired and rightly used. Misapplied — used as an end, not a means — it is a cogent factor of evil.

1. It is unsatisfactory and embittering. As a man who ascends the mountain-side far enough to enter the blinding mists, but not far enough to overlook them, so is the man of godless learning.

2. It destroys the humility and childlike simplicity so essential to a knowledge of real truth.

3. It is inefficient to cleanse from sin. Science, philosophy, all the learning of all the schools cannot, with out Christ's atonement, regenerate sinful man. Give us, then, education; but let it be complete, as far as it goes — moral building up as well as intellectual. Cried Grotlus, the eminent historian, on his death-bed: "Ah! I have consumed all my life in a laborious doing of nothing. I would give all my learning and honour for the plain integrity of John Urick" — a poor man of remarkable piety.

(Homiletic Monthly.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

WEB: always learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.




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