Wisdom 8:19
And I was a witty child and had received a good soul.
Open Wisdom 8:19 in the Motif Searcher, word by word across all five texts →Show on the spiral →The verse in its languages
- Vulgate (Clementine)
- Puer autem eram ingeniosus, et sortitus sum animam bonam.
- Septuagint (Swete)
- παῖς δὲ ἤμην εὐφυής, ψυχῆς τε ἔλαχον ἀγαθῆς,
Haydock's commentary
Received. "By lot," sortitus, (Haydock) to exclude all preceding merit. (St. Augustine, de Gen. lit. x. 18.)
Good soul. Natural dispositions (Pineda) are perfected by grace and labour. (Calmet)
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
St Augustine A Treatise on the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants, What ‘Lighteth’ Means
But why, after saying, “which lighteth every man,” should he add, “that cometh into the world,”, the clause which has suggested the opinion that He enlightens the minds of newly-born babes while the birth of their bodies from their mother’s womb is still a recent thing? The words, no doubt, are so placed in the Greek, that they may be understood to express that the light itself “cometh into the world.” If, nevertheless, the clause must be taken as expressing the man who cometh into this world, I suppose that it is either a simple phrase, like many others one finds in the Scriptures, which may be removed without impairing the general sense; or else, if it is to be regarded as a distinctive addition, it was perhaps inserted in order to distinguish spiritual illumination from that bodily one which enlightens the eyes of the flesh either by means of the luminaries of the sky, or by the light …