THE conditions prescribed by the founder of this Lectureship would seem at first sight to exclude Revealed Religion from the class of subjects with which it deals. The province to which it is limited is that of Natural Theology, defined as the science which treats of “the nature and attributes of God, the relations which man and the whole universe bear to Him, the nature and foundations of Ethics, and of all obligations and duties thence arising”; and the founder further expresses his desire that the subject shall “ be treated as a strictly natural science like Astronomy or Chemistry.”

Waiving the question whether it is possible to treat of the nature and relations of spiritual beings by the same method of investigation which we employ in dealing with inorganic substances, I think it may be shown that a Gifford Lecturer, whilst he may treat of the other historic religions of the world, need not feel himself precluded by any conscious unfaithfulness to the intentions of the founder from attempting a philosophic treatment of that religion which is the culmination of them all. If we ask on what grounds this seemingly arbitrary distinction between Christianity and the pre-Christian religions, or between the Christian religion and the subjects embraced under the phrase “Natural Theology” could be maintained, the answer which some would be disposed to give is that which is involved in the popular distinction which has come down to us as a legacy from the rationalistic theologians of last century—the distinction, I mean, between natural and revealed religion. But if we examine what that distinction means, I think we shall find that it is either wholly untenable, or that in the only sense in which any meaning can be attached to it, it lends no sanction to the proscription of Christianity as a subject of philosophical treatment.

The ordinary notion expressed by this distinction is that there are certain religious ideas, doctrines, principles, such as the idea of the Being and Attributes of God, the Moral Government of the world, and the Immortality of the soul, which are discoverable by “the Light of Nature,” or lie within the province of human reason, and have actually been evolved by it; whilst there are other ideas or doctrines, such as the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, which lie beyond that province, which unaided reason could not have discovered, which have reached, and could only reach, the world by an external, authoritative, supernatural revelation. Philosophy is at home in dealing with the former class of ideas, but to deal with the latter, to examine into the rational grounds, the credibility and coherence of ideas or doctrines which, by hypothesis, transcend the grasp of reason, involves on the part of reason a self-contradictory attitude.

But when we examine more closely the precise import of this distinction, I think we shall see that it does not really involve the arbitrary fencing off of revealed religion from the critical or philosophical intelligence. The claim of philosophy turns, not on the source or origin, but on the contents or intrinsic nature of revelation. Whether thought can deal with Christian truth depends on what it is, not on whence it comes, or by what external mediation it has been communicated to us. The inherent nature and value of ideas which have become a possession of the human mind is a thing wholly independent of the question whether they have been communicated to us in a miraculous and supernatural, or in a purely natural way—on the one hand, by a voice from heaven, from the lips of an inspired prophet, by sacred tradition; or, on the other hand, by the observation of nature, by the study of history, by the teaching and influence of other minds, by the moral and spiritual results of our own experience and reflection.

1. For, in the first place, it is to be considered that much of the teaching of revelation consists of the unveiling to us of the true meaning of nature and human life. One function at least of the inspired record is to help us to read the open secret of the universe; to enable us, by the quickening of our spiritual discernment, to understand the significance of the manifold expression of God in the world and man, the phenomena of nature, the changeful incidents of the individual life, the conflict of man with himself and the world, the mystery of good and evil, of freedom and necessity, of life and death; to enable us to see the revelation of God with which these things are fraught; and again, to help us to discern, behind the veil of outward contingency, that moral order which is involved in the history of nations, the rise and fall of empires, the development of thought and civilization, the progressive life of the human race. In this respect at least, it is the office of revelation, not to instruct us as to some transcendental order of things, not to superadd to what comes from ordinary and human sources of knowledge, something that pertains to a superhuman, supernatural sphere; but rather to enable us to penetrate to the moral and spiritual meaning of the world in which we live, and the teaching which, could we only read it aright, it yields to our minds. And obviously, when revelation fulfils this function, the essence of the teaching it gives is not, so to speak, in itself, but in that system of things whose meaning it unfolds. We cannot get at the religious ideas it contains by reading the words of an inspired book, and constructing out of them correct theological propositions, but only by looking at that other book of nature and life whose pages it illumines and verifies, and letting our souls be penetrated by the light that is ever streaming from it.

Let me offer one or two illustrations of this point. When we find a sacred writer speaking thus: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained,” and going on to deduce from a contemplation of the material world spiritual lessons as to man and his relations to God and nature, the teaching may, indeed, be contained in an inspired Scripture; but the real revelation is that to which the words refer, which they call attention to and point out. No man who had never looked on the nightly heavens, or who was incapable of seeing in them the manifestation of an invisible thought and will, could get at the revelation of the mind of God which this passage contains. And the question whether in this and similar cases the revelation is true, what it amounts to, its rational and spiritual content, its relations to other ideas in the system of human thought—this is a question which is not placed beyond the province of rational investigation because the matter with which it deals is included in what is regarded as a supernatural revelation. Again, when the Bible records for our instruction the life, action, and experience of individuals, or the history of nations, the principle is the same. When, for instance, we read the words of an inspired Psalmist: “Against thee, thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight.” “Cast me not away from thy presence and take not thy holy Spirit from me”; or these of an inspired Prophet, “Oh that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people”; or these of an inspired Apostle, “The good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.” “I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.” “Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”—the words, in all these cases, do indeed convey to us a revelation of divine truth; we learn from them inspired lessons as to sin and repentance, as to the conflict between man's higher and lower nature and the longing of the soul for spiritual deliverance and freedom; but we do so just because they bring before us with marvellous vividness the revelation of sin and sorrow which is uttering itself in the experience of a thousand human hearts. Here, too, the distinction as to its matter between revealed religion and natural religion vanishes.

The same is true when we turn from the history and experience of individuals to that of nations. The historic books of the Old Testament are part of revealed religion; but they are so because and in so far as they are the record of that revelation of the mind and will of God, of that moral order which is unfolded to us in the life of nations and the course of history. The element of fact which they contain is not invented by them, and it no more withdraws itself from examination and criticism than when it supplies materials for ordinary historical investigation. Nor is the moral and spiritual element of sacred history an independent supernatural communication, to be apprehended simply by listening to the voice of an inspired teacher, or construing the words and sentences of a book. The Spirit of God in the sacred narrative is instructing us concerning the principles of the divine government—the inherent might of right, the irresistible prevalence in the long run of good over evil, the tendency of selfishness and wrong to sap the vitality and undermine the fair prosperity of nations. But these are principles which are not simply authoritatively announced in the pages of that narrative, but are woven into the life of humanity. They are at work around us, hedging in our course of action, rewarding duty, executing vengeance on unrighteousness, causing peace, health, wealth, to follow on the steps of national virtue and integrity, and decay and ruin to track, silent and sure, the path of licentiousness and wrong. They are written, not merely in words and sentences, but—as we contemplate the rise and fall of states and empires—now in the living language of greatness, power, world-wide fame and influence, crowning national purity and integrity, and now in the flaring characters of the disaster and ruin that are the providential retribution of national corruption.

And not only is this revelation of history that on which the book-revelation is based, but it far transcends the special examples of its operation which any book, inspires or uninspired, can contain. The everlasting law of righteousness is reflected in the destinies of modern Europe as really as in those of ancient Asia, in the history of England or France or Germany, as in the history of Israel or Egypt or Assyria. The providential order of the world did not hold itself aloof from the fortunes of all but one race or people, nor has it stopped when the period to which the Canonical Scriptures relate came to an end. Those great silent forces which are the expression of the eternal will cease not, and never can cease, to sway the destinies of nations, and in their slow and cyclical movement, to bend all things to that infinite end and purpose to which the whole creation moves. If, then, these eternal laws and principles relate to things earthly and human, if they manifest themselves in the successions of events in the past and present life of humanity, it is the special function of the philosophy of history to elicit and verify them; nor does the fact that specimens of them are recorded in a sacred book, ear-mark them as outside the sphere with which the philosophic historian is permitted to deal.

It may be said, however, that, even admitting that much of the content of the verbal revelation is, in one sense, a reproduction of the real revelation of nature and human life, and can be comprehended only by reference to the latter, this principle does not apply to what may be termed the distinctively supernatural element of revealed religion. If philosophy can claim to deal with nature and history, are not miracles and acts of interposition with natural and historical law, by their very definition, placed beyond the scope of human reason? With respect to such doctrines as the Existence and Attributes of God, and the Moral Government of the world, intellectual satisfaction may not be beyond our reach; for they relate to things of which the proof and verification are to be found in the phenomena of nature, the events of history, and the moral consciousness of man. But can we venture to say as much of such doctrines as the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the Atonement, Regeneration, the whole revealed economy of Redemption? Can we maintain that in announcing these doctrines, revelation is, in any sense, simply unveiling to us the meaning of nature and life? Do they not belong to a transcendental sphere, altogether above and beyond the natural order of things of which reason can take cognizance, and which nothing in that order could enable us to know and verify?

Now, without discussing here the general question as to those doctrines of revelation which, as is sometimes said, though not contrary to reason are yet above reason,1 I think it may be shown that, in one aspect of them at least, these doctrines form no exception to the principle that the distinction between natural and revealed religion is an arbitrary and misleading distinction, and that it is the highest function of revelation to enable us with quickened spiritual discernment to understand the true significance of nature and man and human life. I will take, for example, the one cardinal doctrine of Christianity, the Divinity of Christ, and I confidently maintain that, so far from carrying us into a region foreign to human experience and human consciousness, so far from being a mere oracle in a book, it points to something in fact and life that is most profoundly true and real—to ideas and principles that interpenetrate the very being and essence of humanity; to hopes, aspirations, ideals, which are the very web and woof of the drama of human history. For I ask you, for one thing, to remember that the Divinity of Christ, however we conceive of it, was a Divinity that was capable of being expressed in a human life and through the words and acts of a human personality. Say that his was a perfect life, that it touched the supreme height of what is possible for a being made in God's image, yet whatever lay absolutely beyond the range of human nature, whatever of Divinity could not organically unite itself with and breathe through a human spirit, was not and could not be present in one who, whatever else he was, was really and truly human. The Divinity of Christ was not that of a divine nature in local or mechanical juxtaposition with a human, but of a divine nature that suffused, blended, identified itself with the thoughts, feelings, volitions of a human individuality. If it had consisted of a merely quantitative infinitude, a spatial omnipresence, a physical omnipotence, it would have been something foreign to human nature and human sympathy. But the very end and purpose of the Incarnation, we are expressly told, was to make us “partakers of a divine nature,” to call us to rise above the narrow limits of time and sense and to become sharers of that eternal life which was manifested in the life of Christ; so that what the Son of God was, we too may hope to become —sons of God, one with Him as He is with the Father, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. If this be so, revelation, in this highest mystery of the supernatural, is still intensely natural. So far from dealing with matter transcending human thought, it is just that which throws light on the profoundest experiences of our spiritual nature and life, unveils to us the secret of our boundless capacities of good and evil, of our deepest sorrows and divinest joys, of the hopes and endeavours after an excellence and blessedness which no finite attainment can satisfy. A philosophy, therefore, which pretended to deal with man in his spiritual nature and relations without taking cognizance of the person and life of Christ, would be leaving out of sight the one all-important element of its investigations, neglecting the key to its deepest problems.

2. Another consideration which seems fatal to the arbitrary distinction between the provinces of natural and revealed religion, and therefore to the exclusion of philosophy from the latter, is that, by universal admission, the teaching of revelation finds its best and only sufficient evidence in the consciousness of the believer. If this be conceded, it matters not what theory we hold as to the outward origin of revelation—whether, in other words, like great discoveries in science, or original ideas in philosophy, or immortal productions of art, new ideas in religion owe their origin to minds endowed with a special religious genius and attaining in moments of spiritual elevation a height of spiritual discernment transcending that of ordinary men; or whether, on the other hand, the original depositaries of these ideas received them by a process as independent of the activity of their own intelligence as that by which the mirror reflects objects presented to it.

It might, indeed, be said that the latter method of revelation would imply a superfluous step in the communication of divine truth to the world, inasmuch as, to be of use to mankind, it must, sooner or later, be apprehended not mechanically but spiritually. The outward revelation would still need to be inwardly appropriated by the spiritual intelligence. Neither moral nor religious ideas can be simply transferred to the human spirit in the form of fact. They cannot be made intelligible to the mere logical understanding, nor verified by any evidence outside of, or lower than, themselves. Their rich content can only pass into and become nutriment to the soul that by its own spiritual energy appropriates and assimilates them. Even if the first prophet had been a mere infallible conductor of words, yet the witness of the spirit, the inspiration of the religious intelligence, must be present in the minds that truly apprehend them.

But if this be so, revealed truth cannot belong to a different order from all other truth that appeals to the human consciousness and with which it is the province of philosophy to deal. Even conceding the barest notion of external infallibility in the original communication, this must be so. For, however inferior the faculty of recognizing and verifying may be to that of discovering or excogitating, recognition and verification would be impossible if the truth recognized did not belong to the same order with all other truth, or if the mind that receives and authenticates were not essentially akin to the mind that communicates. It is no doubt true that the measure of intelligence which qualifies a man to receive and appreciate thought falls short of that which qualifies him to create or excogitate it. Creative, originative minds belong to a class or order distinctively superior to that of those who are merely or mainly receptive. Nevertheless, widely as they may differ in the measure and range of their intellectual power, the apprehending mind proves, by the very fact that it can apprehend and appreciate the products of the inventive or creative mind, that it is of the same essence, kindred in nature and faculty with it. Unless there were in my mind something essentially one with that of the greatest scientific or philosophic thinker, no bridge could be built over which thought could pass from mind to mind. Is it not a common-place that the power to charm and thrill men's minds, the secret of the spell which the great poet wields over multitudes of other minds is this, that he is giving voice to the dumb, inarticulate poetry within their own breasts—to thoughts and feelings which, though his alone is the capacity to give utterance to them, the common heart and spirit of humanity recognizes as its own? The teaching, in short, of great and original minds may be a communication of new ideas to us, but it is so, because it interprets us to ourselves.

And the same principle applies to the case before us. The power to apprehend and verify the truths which inspired writers have taught us proves, not indeed that by any a priori process of thought the individual mind could have excogitated them, but that in the deepest sense they are congenial to man's nature, and that no hard and fast line can be drawn between them and those religious ideas which, it is alleged, have been the fruit of unaided inquiry and reflection. Nay, if we were to compare the teaching of revelation with that of the so-called natural religion in point of accordance with reason and conscience, I unhesitatingly affirm that the former is more profoundly rational, more deeply true to our spiritual intelligence, than the latter. The idea of God as Father of spirits, essentially one with humanity, having His highest manifestation in a human person and life, and dwelling in us by His spirit, is not less but more satisfactory to reason than the conception of God as a “First Cause” or a “Creator and Moral Ruler of the world,” which is the doctrine of natural religion. The perfect moral ideal which broke upon the world in the person and life of Christ contains in it elements of moral truth and beauty not less but more accordant with our capacity of knowing and appreciating what is good and fair, than the ethical ideas which moralists have struck out apart from it and by what is called the light of nature. The “eternal life” which Christianity reveals—a life of union and communion with God, in which the finite spirit rises above the power of change and decay into participation in the very life of the Eternal—this is a doctrine more true to man's being and its infinite capabilities, not less but immeasurably more accordant with thought and reason than that notion of a mere survival after death, or of an “immortality of the soul,” based on vague speculations and imperfect analogies, which the light of nature is supposed to yield.

3. And this leads me to remark further, that the impossibility of marking off certain religious ideas as due to natural reason, from certain other ideas as pertaining to the province of revelation, is shown by this, that Christianity or Christian thought annuls and transcends the religious ideas of natural religion. The notion that there is one set of truths, such as the existence and providence of God, the principles of morality, and the natural immortality of the soul, which we can accept on the testimony of reason, and another set of truths, the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel, which we must accept, if at all, on the testimony of revelation, is for Christian thought futile and impossible. The truths of natural religion, in so far as they are contained in Christianity, are not contained therein simply by addition or accretion, but rather by absorption and transmutation. You cannot as a Christian simply hold in common with Deists or Jews or Mohammedans, the doctrines of natural religion, while you add to them certain other doctrines which are peculiar to Christianity. The new element which Christianity has introduced into the thought of the world transforms, elevates, works a fundamental change in all the previous materials of religious knowledge. It takes up these materials into itself, but it takes them up as the plant takes up air and earth and moisture and light, or as the living body takes up the matter which constitutes its food—not transferring them wholesale, but by its inward organic chemistry, subduing, disintegrating, reconstructing all that it receives into similitude with its own higher nature. There is not a single doctrine of natural religion which, when it enters into the content of the Christian faith, remains what it was outside of Christianity. The God of natural religion is not the same with the God of Christianity. Christianity knows no such being as a “First Cause” or “an Almighty Creator and Governor of the world”—a being framed at best after the image of man, an anthropomorphic potentate seated on a celestial throne, publishing laws and dispensing rewards and punishments after the manner of an earthly sovereign or magistrate. By its cardinal doctrine of the unity of God and Man, Christianity has dissolved the dualism which such notions involved, bridged the gulf between the finite and infinite which, apart from Christianity, was never spanned, and by its conception of the self-realization of God in humanity, solved the problem which baffled the greatest minds of ancient times.

Christian morality, again, is not the same with natural morality; it has had an infinite element infused into it. Virtue has been transformed into holiness, obedience to an outward law or even to the imperative of conscience, into participation in a divine spirit and the realization in all social relations of a divine organic life; and on the other hand, vice has become sin, disobedience to law has deepened into selfish alienation from God and the arresting or abandonment of an infinite destiny. Our ideas, to name no others, of human freedom, of repentance and reformation, of the dignity and value of the soul, of the equality and brotherhood of men, of the future destiny of the race, are not mere complements of the ideas of natural religion. They are, as I have said, profoundly rational, but if there are ideas analogous to them in extra-Christian thought, these have so felt the leavening touch of Christianity as to be, in their independent existence, annulled and superseded. They no more continue to exist side by side in the same system of thought with Christian ideas, than the dawn continues to exist side by side with the light of noonday, or the blossom, fruit and flower side by side with the seed or germ. There is therefore, we repeat, no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.

4. Philosophy then cannot limit its province to natural religion to the exclusion of Christianity, for this, if for no other reason, that Christianity interprets natural religion to itself. And for the same reason, let me add finally, philosophy claims to deal with Christianity as the key to the other religions of the world. The study of the other historic or pre-Christian religions is unquestionably of deep interest and importance for the inquirer into the nature of religion in general; but its importance has often been made to rest on false grounds. Writers on what is called “the Science of Religions” have sometimes argued for that science either on the ground, that the true idea or essence of religion is to be reached inductively, by comparing all the religions of the world and discovering what is the common element in them; or, on the ground that these religions rise out of each other by a process of development, and that by going back to the earliest origin of religion and following the steps of the process upwards, we shall be able to account for Christianity on purely natural grounds, or as the natural product of causes at work in the pre-Christian religions. Such writers, I cannot help thinking, misunderstand the relation of Christianity to the other religions; and they do so because they fail to see what is really involved in their own idea of a process of development. For, if there be such a process in religion, it implies, first, that you can never get at the true idea or essence of religion merely by trying to find out something that is common to all religions, and, second, that it is not the lower religions that explain the higher, but conversely, the higher religion that is the explanation of all the lower religions.

As to the former of these points, the essential element of religion is not to be reached by leaving out from the various positive religions the special characteristics which distinguish them from each other, and retaining only those ideas or beliefs which are found to be common to all. For it is obvious that wherever in the phenomena we observe we are obliged to introduce the notion of growth or development, wherever, in other words, that which we contemplate is a thing that reaches its perfection not by accretion or accumulation of like materials, but by gradual evolution from the germ to the perfect organism, there the true idea of the thing is not what is common to the lowest and highest and every intermediate stage of its existence. To have regard only to what is common to the fruit or flower with the seed and stalk and stem, would not help us to the essential idea of the plant. It is not that which is the same in the embryo and the full-grown body, but rather that differentiation of organs and functions in which the latter rises above and differs from the former, that gives us the true conception of the organism. Nor is the nature of man as an intelligent being to be discovered by the application of a common measure, which would embrace only what pertains alike to the highly developed intellect in the maturity of its powers and to the rude gropings after knowledge of the world and of itself, which mark the dawn of intelligence in the infant. On the contrary, in all organic development, the perfect organism, whilst it comprehends, at the same time transcends and transmutes all that pertained to the earlier stages of its life; and that which is really common to all these stages is something that cannot be reached inductively, but only by grasping the idea which is present only potentially in the lower, and is never fully realized till the organism has reached its highest stage. In like manner, a merely empirical consideration or comparative view of the various religions of the world, however important it may be, as supplying the material for a Science of Religions, does not in itself constitute such a science. If in the religious history of mankind we can discover indications of a progressive development, it is not by leaving out of view what is peculiar to Christianity, those ideas which constitute its special glory and excellence, and taking account only of that which we see or suppose to be common to it with the earliest and rudest nature worship, that we can discover the real meaning of that history: for it is just that in which Christianity differs from all the pre-Christian religions which realizes, for the first time, the true idea of religion. As the absolute and only perfect form of that idea, Christianity, whilst it explains the latent significance of all that was true in the imperfect religions, at the same time transcends, and in transcending, transmutes and annuls or supersedes them.

Moreover, it follows from this that those writers are on an altogether false quest whose aim, covertly or avowedly, in tracing the history of religions, is to reduce Christianity and its doctrines to a purely natural product. The underlying principle of their speculations seems to be, that if they can discover the earliest form of religion—ghost-worship, ancestor-worship, nature-worship or what not; or the tendency or sentiment in human nature—wonder, awe, abject dependence, craven fear of the supernatural—which is expressed in these forms, they will have possessed themselves of the key to the whole subsequent religious history of mankind. By the ordinary law of cause and effect they can trace from this source the rise of the various forms of religion, polytheistic, pantheistic, or monotheistic. In these they find merely the complex result, under various conditions and circumstances, of an intelligible and purely natural process, and in Christianity itself only at most the culmination of that process.

But the fallacy which underlies any such theory of man's religious history is that of confusing the final with the efficient cause of the phenomena to be explained; in other words, of overlooking the distinction between the historical beginning of a thing and its essential principle or end. Even if, for argument's sake, we concede the unconditional application of the principle of development to religion, it is not in the beginning but in the end, not in the first but in the last manifestation of the principle of religion, that the true explanation of the process is to be sought. By an analogous application of the idea of evolution, there are, as we know, certain scientific thinkers in our day, who have persuaded themselves that mind is only a function of matter, that the organic world is only a complex result of mechanical and chemical forces, that biological phenomena are resolvable into physical, and psychological into physiological, and that thought, sensation, feeling, and intelligence in general, are only a product of nervous action, a function of material organization. As these thinkers find the key to the phenomena of the universe in the mechanical laws that govern the movements of an atom, so the writers on religion of whom I speak find the ultimate explanation of all religious phenomena in the primitive religious sentiment modified by the action and reaction of outward environment. But, as I have said, if we are to seek anywhere for the true cause or origin of an organic process, the true explanation of all the phenomena of growth, it is not in the factual commencement, but in the final result, or rather in that ideal end which silently dominates the beginning and every successive step of its outward history. The true origin of the plant is not the first stirring of vital activity in the seed or germ, it is that ideal principle or plan of its existence which dominates and determines the outward phenomenal beginning, and silently directs its whole subsequent history. So, it is only because, and in so far as, the power of the highest or absolute religion is already working in the earliest and all subsequent forms of man's spiritual life, dominating, shaping, transmuting, elevating them, that these religious phenomena have any meaning or reality. If, therefore, as we have seen, philosophy cannot deal with natural religion to the exclusion of Christianity, because it finds in Christianity that which explains natural religion to itself; by parity of reasoning, philosophy must refuse to treat only of the pre-Christian religions. For it is Christianity, as the highest and only perfect realization of the idea of religion, that explains all the imperfect expressions of that idea; in other words, it is Christianity that throws light on the “unconscious prophecies of heathendom,” those fore-shadowings of moral and spiritual ideas, those partial anticipations of Christian thought which the pre-Christian religions contain.