We are taking our stand upon the ultimate fact of the moral consciousness of mankind—the sense of “I ought,” and the idea of the good life founded upon this sense of obligation. We have found that this fact and this idea receive two kinds of interpretation among the moral leaders of mankind—which we have called the idealistic and the theistic—which differ, as in other respects, so especially in respect of the emphasis laid on the personality and transcendence of God. The course of our argument has been directed to vindicating the superior rationality of the latter, the theistic, interpretation—both its interpretation of God and its interpretation of human sin as rebellion against God. We now proceed to another point.

§ 1

It cannot be denied, if we consider the history of Zarathustra, of Muhammad, of Israel’s prophets, and of Jesus of Nazareth, that the strongest and highest convictions concerning God and His will for mankind which have appeared in human history, and have transformed the imagination and conduct of individuals and peoples, have been unhesitatingly ascribed by the prophets who propounded them, not to their own thought or discovery, but to the direct action of God disclosing Himself to the individual prophet and sending him to deliver His message to mankind. And the prophet has assumed that there exists in the souls of his fellow-men at least a faculty for recognizing the authority of the message, as Adeimantus in Plato’s Republic is represented as welcoming Socrates’ dogmatic assertion of the pure goodness of God with the words, “Now you say so, I give my assent.”1 Thus the well-disposed part of mankind, when listening to the prophets, has, whether enthusiastically or reluctantly, made the prophet’s conviction their own in virtue of their common moral consciousness. Indeed, man in general recognizes in his conscience at least “the daughter of the voice” of God. “Man’s conscience is the lamp of the Eternal, flashing into his inmost soul.” So Dr. Moffatt brilliantly renders a verse in the Book of Proverbs.2

This estimate of conscience is widespread among mankind. It was especially vivid among the Stoics, from whom it is true to say our popular idea of conscience is largely derived. Thus Seneca speaks of conscience as “a holy spirit residing in us, the guardian and observer of our good and evil deeds.”3 It is reported again as existing, in a striking form, among savage people, as when an individual is seized with a mysterious terror at the thought of doing or having done something wrong. But besides this haunting sense of God as speaking in the common conscience of man, the prophetic sense of a positive inspiration to speak a particular message from God, or from some particular god, is also widespread—it is by no means confined to Israel. It is impressively presented to us in Zarathustra; and though Muhammad appears clearly enough in his later career to have sophisticated his conscience and produced “oracles” dictated, in fact, by nothing better than his sense of political expediency or his passions, yet those who accept the claim of Israel’s prophets to divine inspiration can hardly refuse to recognize genuine inspiration in Muhammad at least at the beginning of his prophetic career. It was a Jew who bade us recognize that “the spirit of the Lord filleth the world,” and that “from generation to generation” His wisdom, “passing into holy souls, maketh them friends of God and prophets.”4

It is true that the common belief in messages from gods given through inspired individuals, as we find this belief in popular religions, in China and India, in Egypt and in Greece, is not generally impressive intellectually or morally. We feel that as we read such a book as Edwyn Bevan’s Sibyls and Seers. Indeed, among the Greeks, where we find this belief increasingly influential in the Hellenistic age, both in connection with the mystery-cults, and along a different line in the Hermetic books, it is associated with the decay of that clear and confident rationality which is part of what is highest in the Greek genius. Still, we reverence in Socrates his belief in his divine vocation to teach the Athenians to “care for their souls,” and in his “demon,” which restrained him when he was going astray; we remember also Plato’s enthusiastic recognition of the “inspired” men who, without argument, have enlightened their fellows; and, what is in the highest degree moving, the desire which he attributes to Simmias in the Phaedo, when he recognizes the unconvincing character of human arguments on behalf of immortality—even of Socrates’ “swan-song” just before his death—for some “word of God” which should be able to give fuller assurance.5 Let us have this fact, then, clearly in our minds, that of what we esteem most valuable in our human heritage a great part comes from those prophetic souls, who would have repudiated altogether having invented or discovered what they announce, and with the deepest conviction would have ascribed it to the self-revelation of God in their own souls—the word of God.6

§ 2

Psychology has been occupied recently in discussing whether we can recognize in our human nature any distinctive faculty which can be called the religious faculty, or any immediate experience of God as an objective reality. Dr. Tennant,7 sternly refuses to recognize any such faculty or experience. “There is no ‘higher facultt’ than those involved in ordinary knowledge.” “If the ‘truth of religion’ or ‘the validity of religious experience’ is to be established at all, it must be as reasonable inference from discursive ‘knowledge’ about the world, human history, the soul with its faculties and capacities; and above all, from knowledge of the interconnections between such items of knowledge.”

Now, I think we are right in entertaining a hearty dislike of the “faculty psychology” as it was current among the Greeks, and has reappeared from time to time in generations nearer to us, because it has tended to separate emotion, reason and volition from one another in our souls, as if they existed in separate compartments, and were really distinguishable entities. We put it to the credit of Tertullian that he should have striven to make it a feature of Christian philosophy that it should emphasize the unity of the soul of man, which feels when it reasons and reasons when it feels8—and, we must add, wills both in reasoning and feeling. But Dr. Tennant seems to suggest that the alternative to recognizing a separate faculty for religion in man is to acquiesce in the position that his belief in God must ultimately be the outcome of his reasoning faculty, a conclusion which he draws from the evidence supplied ultimately in sensible experience. Yet, as we have just been saying, the most impressive figures which religious history presents to us would surely refuse this estimate of their knowledge of God. Without denying that the existence of God may be a valid conclusion of reasoning, they would say—Not so have we known God or felt able to speak of Him to our fellows.

Zarathustra never appears as reasoning at all. He experiences directly, amid the desperate straits of his people, a mighty call of God in his soul, summoning him to co-operate in His redemptive purpose. So it is with the prophets of Israel. We hear them talking with God—that is, strongly representing their own inclinations and thoughts to God, and finding them overruled by His constraining authority and commission. Most obviously of all, it seems quite impossible to place ourselves face to face with Jesus of Nazareth and listen to His utterances about God, spoken in such a tone of infallible authority, and then to say, “I dispute this conclusion of yours as based on insufficient evidence”; for it is not uttered as a human conclusion based on an estimate of evidence at all. It is something coming from above, conveying a divine certitude so impressive that almost any man, however sceptical, will find it hard indeed to bring himself to say, “I do not believe that you know more about God than I or any other man with a reasoning mind.”

The real question, it seems to me, is not whether man has a special religious faculty, but whether his soul, or conscious self, is accessible to God, and whether God is a being who can make such an impression of Himself upon the human spirit as cannot but utter itself in communicable propositions for the intellect and directions for the will. I suggest that our contemporary psychologists and philosophers not only commonly fail to find a satisfying answer to this question, but fail to put the question in its proper form, which is an important part of philosophy. I remember visiting Edward Caird on his death-bed in the Master’s Lodge at Balliol, and finding him reading St. Augustine’s Confessions; and he said to me, “Whatever philosophers may say about this man’s answers, at any rate he knew how to ask the right questions.” There is a great deal in that. The right question in this case is: Can it be denied that, at very different stages of intellectual progress, and therefore with very different capacities for intellectual formulation of their impressions, certain men at any rate have received such overwhelmingly vivid impressions of God “speaking” directly to them as that they could not doubt the objective reality of their experience, and could not but express it in propositions for the intellect and directions for the will of their fellow-men; and that the reception of their teaching as “the word of God” has had such surprising and permanent results in lifting the lives of their disciples to a higher moral and spiritual plane that we can hardly refrain from saying that their claim has received a kind of verification in experience?9

It is true that when we survey the records of revelations, supposed to be divine, given in different ages among different peoples, the evidences of crude and unspiritual ideas in the minds of the prophets, who have claimed to have received these divine communications, often force us to recognize in the human subject a medium which at least deeply colours and distorts the supposed word of God. It follows that if God is really to be recognized as “speaking,” it is through an integument, often a very thick integument, of human material. One chief interest in the Old Testament is to observe how this thick and disturbing integument is gradually refined so as to become the pure vehicle which it is in the higher reaches of Hebrew prophecy, while yet these higher reaches are obviously continuous with its lower levels. But still the area of such supposed communications is so wide, and the effect of them on the whole in the noblest instances tends to such agreement, that it seems unreasonable to doubt that, responding to the efforts of man’s struggling thought and passionate prayer—“seeking after God, if haply he may feel after him and find him”—God Himself has moved out towards man to assure, to strengthen, to guide and to enlighten. For myself, I profess, I cannot read Zarathustra and the prophets of Israel or listen to the words of Jesus without receiving the conviction that so it has been. “God who in many portions and many manners spake in old times unto our fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His son”—one who is more than any prophet.

It is exactly this question which many of our contemporary philosophers or theologians seem to me not to be willing to put to themselves. And I ask, “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you” that God should so disclose himself to men?

I will mention only one instance of this ignoring of the real question. I read many critical studies of St. Paul which trace the development of his theology—especially his doctrine of the person of Christ—in which he is described as sitting down, like a philosopher, and producing a “first draft” of his theory in one of his epistles and a considerably different version of the theory in another. Now, as a critic I read the evidence differently. I think the whole theory of what is called the cosmic function of the Son of God before His incarnation, and His eternal life in God, as you find it in Colossians or Philippians, is already substantially present in such phrases of the earlier epistles as “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him,” or “our Lord Jesus Christ” who “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor.”10

I see no substantial difference in meaning between the four passages. I think the critics have a far too acute eye for differences, and are far too insensitive to substantial unities. Their method is too microscopic when applied to such untechnical language as that of St. Paul’s epistles.

But to examine this question is not our present business. I do not dispute that St. Paul had to find words to express what was in his mind, and found this a difficult task, and in finding expression for his thought drew upon the existing intellectual furniture of his mind. I think that in all, even the highest, utterances claimed to be divine words, must be recognized the human element of representation. But what the critics ignore is the fact, which seems to me indisputable, that St. Paul, from the time of His conversion, recognized the divine sonship of Jesus as a revelation of God made to himself personally, which it was his urgent business henceforth to propagate, and which did not leave him much choice in his manner of propagating it. “It pleased God,” he says, “to reveal his Son in me,” or rather “through me”11; for the phrase implies not only the fact of the veridical revelation in his own soul, but the stringent obligation to impart it, and to claim its reception as not the word of man but the word of God. Our contemporary critics of the Bible and our philosophers seem to me neither to estimate at its due importance this psychological fact witnessed to by “the goodly fellowship of the prophets,” nor to connect it with the general significance of the testimony of conscience as (when not deliberately sophisticated) bearing witness to a word of God vaguely conceived, which the specific revelations presuppose and render more explicit. It is upon the importance of this idea of divine self-revelation, general and particular, explicit enough to be expressed in propositions for the intellect and directions for the will, that I want to concentrate your attention.

It is not the only road by which men have believed themselves to reach the knowledge of God. There has been also the method of reasoning from premisses supplied by experience to conclusions reached by logic. That is the characteristic method of philosophers. Greece is the central home of philosophy, and of this kind of philosophy, though it must never be forgotten that the whole Platonic theology rests upon certain moral assumptions which Socrates felt as God’s word to mankind. But this is not the only method by which man has seemed to himself to approach God. To man’s quest there has been God’s response, or God’s spontaneous act has preceded all man’s enquiry. God has revealed Himself; and of the consciousness of this we find the most conspicuous witnesses in the prophets of mankind and the supreme type in the prophets of Israel and in Jesus. The fact on which I want to concentrate your attention is not only that so the prophets and Jesus believed and spoke, but that their testimony has been believed through the subsequent generations as true, and has been acted upon, and that the best of mankind have found their faith confirmed in experience by the vast enhancement of moral capacity which their faith has generated in them. To refuse to give serious attention to this immense volume of testimony seems to go contrary to what appears to be a fundamental canon of human reason; namely, that what greatly augments human powers, and lifts mankind permanently to a higher level than it had shown signs of being able to reach before, must be rooted in reality.12

§ 3

What is called the “otherness” of God13 has been much emphasized in Germany and Northern Europe lately, under the influence of Dr. Otto and Dr. Karl Barth. These powerful teachers, very different in their points of view, agree in a determination to make us realize that God, as He presents Himself to the human conscience, and as He appears in the records of revelation, is wholly other to man, overwhelming his consciousness by His inconceivable majesty, thundering upon him with His judgment, and leaving him utterly prostrate and passive. There was, no doubt, an immense need for this reassertion of the “numinousness” of God and of the “tremendous mystery”: we recall, in illustration of this numinousness, not only scenes in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but the terrible theophany in the Bhagavadgita.

But we must never forget that though there are moments in the Old Testament where God appears as a mere terror, this is not the impression we are allowed to retain. We are not allowed permanently to forget what is involved in the conception that man is created in the image of God. It means that he has within him, in his conscience and reason, something which testifies to the character of God; something to which God must justify Himself, and by which man must judge of what is divine. It is this which gives its tremendous force to Job’s protest against the seeming injustice and cruelty of God. It is Job’s conscience and reason which give him the right to make his almost blasphemous protest against God’s apparent conduct to himself. He is appealing against the apparent God to what he feels must be the real God. When God answers Job out of the whirlwind, He seems at first hearing only to appal him by His majestic power; and Job appears to be satisfied merely by having wrung an answer from God, though it is an annihilating answer. But that is not all. Job’s previous protests against God are justified in the great drama by the voice of God. Job spoke, it appears, well after all, while his more pious-seeming friends spoke ill. And more than that, the seemingly trivial conclusion of the story, with the restoration to Job to more than his former prosperity, is really essential. It represents, though it be in a childish form, the conviction that God is bound by His very being to justify Himself to the human conscience. He must finally appear to have behaved justly. The same ultimate principle appears in the passage of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where first he appeals to the merely numinous—to the irresistible authority or absolute determination of God—“Who art thou, O man, that repliest against God—the clay against the potter?” But the argument goes on to give a very different impression—that behind God’s temporal judgments there lies a mercy which is both ultimate and universal, and a wisdom which must finally justify itself to man.

So it is that in Old Testament and New Testament alike God makes His appeal for justification to the human conscience—“O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I injured thee? testify against me.”14 “Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right.”15 “True and righteous are God’s judgments.”16

This consciousness restrains the Christian from ever justifying an irrational faith, or an idea of revelation which leaves the human reason and conscience merely passive before it. Not even miraculous power is to convince us against our conscience. Nothing, in fact, is more striking in the Gospels than the sense they give of a divine authority in Jesus which consistently refuses to terrify and overwhelm the conscience and reason of those who listened to Him. He refuses utterly to stun men into acceptance of His word by mere power. He must both win their hearts and convince their consciences and reasons. This is the tone of the whole New Testament.

Thus, if we are agreed to take the New Testament as presenting to us the highest type of ethical monotheism, and if we recognize, as we are bound to, that it presents to us a “word of God” and not a “word of men,” a divine revelation and not a conclusion of human reasoning, yet we can never allow ourselves to isolate and exalt the supernatural, as if the natural were of no account, or as if it were possible for God, who made us in His image, to crush either our reason or our conscience.

§ 3

I have just used the word “supernatural,” and contrasted it with “natural,” but it is a word very liable to lead to misunderstanding. When we contrast the laborious attempts of the human reason to interpret experience with the brilliant illumination thrown upon experience by the mere word of God, spoken by the prophets, we cannot help distinguishing the results as natural and supernatural; or when, like St. Paul, we contrast the failure of man’s best efforts, as he struggles by the exertion of his own will to realize what he recognizes to be right, with the triumphant power felt in the converted life, consciously inspired by the Spirit, it is irresistible to express the contrast as that of nature to supernatural grace. We cannot, as things are, do without this contrast of natural and supernatural. But this cannot be pressed to the point of dualism. It is the same God who works within us as an influence, and from without us as the giver of objective messages and objective gifts, perhaps embodied in visible sacraments. What is recognized as truly a divine word must be found to correspond to, and crown, the best intimations of human reason; and the most objectively conceived gifts of divine grace must be estimated as only co-operating with the responsive movement of the human soul from within. We cannot, then, do without the word “supernatural,” whether as applied to revelation or to grace, but if we seek, with Aquinas, to draw the line between the elements in our belief which are natural and supernatural, we shall probably find ourselves baffled in the attempt, and if we seek to draw the same line between grace and nature, we shall find ourselves compelled to acknowledge, as even Augustine acknowledged, that grace is not contrary to nature, but is the restoration of nature. God as transcendent and acting as from without must never even for an hour be separated in our thought from God as universally and in all men immanent and inwardly operative.17

It cannot be denied that there has appeared in the Christian Church again and again a tendency to put the supernatural in violent contrast to the natural, and in particular so to exalt revealed truth as to delight in the disparagement of reason. Impulsive individuals like Tertullian and Luther will be found guilty in this respect as well as hosts of lesser men, and the tendency dominates whole periods, just as, from widely different motives, what we may call anti-intellectualism dominates certain periods in literature; but we must put it to the credit of the Christian Church, that it has not, at its best periods and in its best representatives, shrunk from the appeal to conscience and reason. Thus, when it went out into the Hellenistic world in its first period of conflict, all the time that it was claiming the position of a society entrusted with an authoritative word of God, meant for all men and demanding “the obedience of faith,” it was proclaiming also the rights of the human reason as reflecting the reason of God, and showing its power to assimilate, even while it inevitably modified and corrected, the Platonic tradition in philosophy, and in particular the moral philosophy which was both Platonic and Stoic. The resultant synthesis you see in the theology of the Greek Fathers and of Augustine, and in respect of morality in Ambrose and his followers. A second magnificent synthesis followed the revival of philosophical thought in the thirteenth century. There has been no like synthesis effected since the period of the later Renaissance, and it is not likely that the present generation will enjoy the spectacle of a commonly recognized alliance between religion and science or religion and philosophy.

For the thought of mankind, alike theological, moral and scientific, is in a condition of too great unsettlement to admit of such an immediate hope; and the Christian tradition, both Catholic and Protestant, had wedded itself, as indissolubly as it could, to an antiquated science of nature and to the idea of “the infallible book”; and the progress of the natural sciences and of historical criticism has demanded a readjustment of religious ideas which goes very deep, and is difficult for a broad and divided society like the Christian Church to accomplish. But it cannot be denied that a large number of our best and ablest Christian thinkers—not least in Scotland—have recognized with a whole-hearted allegiance the divine rights of science and criticism, and have found their way, in their own minds and in their writings, to a synthesis between the Christianity of the New Testament, undiminished in force, and modern knowledge, such as is worthy of the name—a synthesis which satisfies their own reason and that of others. Elsewhere, I have tried to go into the details of such a synthesis, but it would be beyond my scope in these lectures. It is, however, much to be lamented that those who stand out in current literature as the critics and repudiators of the Christian tradition, so often appear to have confined their study of Christianity to the theology of a hundred years ago, or to that of their grandmother Lois or their mother Eunice. This is a criticism which applies to really distinguished men. They exhibit an ignorance of Christian thought at its best, whether ancient or modern, the like of which in the treatment of science would expose a theologian to well-merited ignominy.

§ 4

But we must pay special attention to one method by which it is proposed to destroy the impressive force of the appeal to a divine self-disclosure.

It is proposed to explain, or explain away, the impression to which the human conscience has so widely surrendered itself, of being in contact with a God who knows it and would communicate Himself to it, by psychological considerations. Thus the experience of answers to prayer is resolved into self-suggestion, and self-revelation of God into “uprushes from the subconscious.” Now, we have admitted, and shall shortly be considering the meaning of our admission, that there is no demonstrative evidence a priori to confute the absolute sceptic who declares we cannot possibly know anything except the content of our own minds. But we can recognize that the whole of the human advance, alike nature-ward, man-ward and God-ward, has been based on a fundamental faith natural to man, that his instinctive assumptions are not purely delusive but bring him into contact with reality; and it is very difficult to affirm the reality of nature and the trustworthiness of natural science while refusing to recognize the reality of the spiritual values inherent in nature and the divine activity upon the soul of man, to both of which the human conscience bears convincing witness.18

But we may go farther than that: we may point out that the subconscious region of man’s mind, while it is or may be the depository of a vast amount of animal and subhuman instincts and “racial memories” and mental experiences, which prudence or pride has forced us to suppress, has provided no evidence at all worthy of the name to show that it can be the source of new knowledge or fresh disclosures such as have advanced and ennobled mankind. Inheritances from a subhuman ancestry, or from early man, may be latent within us, and be capable of re-emerging. Forgotten memories may be renewed and latent forces reawakened. Thus there is a great deal in the history of debased religion and in the records of frenzied prophecy which may rightly be laid to the credit, or discredit, of the subconscious; but there is very little to lead us to believe that there is anything stored in man below the line of consciousness which does not belong to the past of the individual or his progenitors. It is the active conscious mind or will or heart which appears to have the credit for the ideas and discoveries which have advanced mankind. There is no justification for attributing to “the subconscious” the thoughts or utterances of Amos or Isaiah or Jesus. There was nothing in their past traditions to account for such thoughts. It must be acknowledged that they have all the appearance of being down-rushes from the superconscious rather than uprushes from below the level.19 Philo, indeed, the Jewish philosopher who sought to co-ordinate the religion of Israel with the current philosophy of the first century, adopted the pagan idea of inspiration, as something which must first dispossess the human reason before it could enter into possession, and could only use the human being for its organ of expression as the pipe-player uses his pipe. But the Christian Church repudiated this idea of inspiration and prophecy. It was the fullest and most-awakened human consciousness which, in Amos and Isaiah and the rest, it believed to have responded to the coming upon them of the divine Spirit.

It does not seem to me that we can prove by any absolute demonstration either the reality of God’s revelation of Himself or indeed any other of the normal conclusions of the human reason. We cannot dispense with faith. But in the lecture which concludes this series I shall be contending that there is a fundamental faith which is so far from being irrational that it is a primary constituent of reason. My point at present is that the normal man, if he will dare to think freely, and will place himself deliberately face to face with the great prophets of history or especially with the prophets of Israel and with Jesus Christ, will find himself strongly constrained to believe that they were divinely inspired.

Certainly, if we take into account the whole range of human enlightenment, we cannot easily escape the conclusion that, much as mankind owes to scientific records and to the logical reason, it owes at least as much to what we cannot but call inspiration—and I am not only thinking of the inspiration of prophets, but also of that of the poets and musicians and artists. The materials on which these masters of men worked are nature and human kind—the sights, the sounds, the experiences which are common to all men. When we common men read or hear or behold their “creations,” we can appreciate them, and in some measure assimilate them, for we have a sensibility like theirs. But what they possess—what constitutes them masters of our souls—is not any superiority in the reasoning powers, but an immense superiority in the power of their intuition. Beauty is an important element in reality, and it is discovered by intuition not reasoning. The poet’s or artist’s soul is extraordinarily receptive of this reality. We cannot really express what we feel about him so well as by saying that the spirit of beauty in nature (which is the spirit of God) has inspired the man, and enabled him so to express this spirit of beauty in words or musical sounds or artistic symbols as that the souls of commoner men can feel it with him and rejoice with a joy unspeakable. He is an inspired man, and the vehicle therefore of a revelation. It seems to me absurd to deny how large a proportion of human enlightenment we owe to inspired men.

But I return to the special kind of inspiration and revelation which at present is occupying our attention. I am conscious of what appears to be an almost irresistible antipathy in many of the leading representations of the “modern mind” to the very idea of such divine revelation as is claimed for the Christian religion, and I will endeavour to analyse this antipathy into its intellectual elements.

§ 5

(a) There is first the fact that the supposed divine self-revelation, especially as it culminates in Christ, is associated with the occurrence of miracles. A generation back it was supposed that science was in a position to repudiate the miraculous as such. But that appears to be no longer a maintainable position. It is hardly too much to say that Dr. Tennant has demonstrated its untenability20; and Prof. Hobson, in his Survey21 has stated plainly and forcibly that “it is a piece of a priori dogmatism, quite incapable of substantiation on scientific grounds.” Science does not know nearly enough to exclude the possibility of the miraculous from its idea of nature, any more than to exclude the “free determination” of human actions.

It is the truth, I think, that the question of freedom in man and the question of the possibility of the miraculous are one and the same question. If we cannot deny that man can deliberate, and within certain limits choose and determine his course of action, and that the very evidence of rationality in man, by contrast with instinct in animals, is that he can and does under exceptional circumstances act exceptionally, it is impossible to deny to the supreme Spirit, if such there be, the same freedom for exceptional action, or perhaps I should say, of something higher and less expressible in human language, of which this freedom in man is the best analogue.

If we turn from science to history we find the same prejudice among the historians (though by no means without exception) against the admission of the miraculous. It is quite true that most of the stories of the miraculous which we find in human tradition are such that human credulity and self-hypnotism or crowd-hypnotism can easily account for them. There is nothing in literature less impressive than hagiology in the mass. But history is very far off the position of being able to profess such a knowledge of the ultimate laws of nature or human action as to deny that some miraculous events have in fact occurred. Logically, the recognition that human imagination has so craved the miraculous as to imagine it freely where it has not really occurred, is no sort of justification for saying that it never has occurred in fact.

Nor is it to the point to argue that the Christian faith would be all the better for discarding the miraculous.22 Speaking for myself, I wholly dispute this position. I feel sure that, as Christianity could never have got its start without the miracles of Christ and in particular without its confident proclamation of the miracle of His resurrection, so I believe it could not retain its hold without these elements. They supply the certificate human nature so greatly needs, that the God of Nature is also the Saviour. But this question is really irrelevant. The point is, how, in fact, did Christ present Himself? And I dare to say that, after a century of drastic criticism of the Gospels, nothing has become more evident than that, if you repudiate a priori the miraculous element out of the original tradition, you so destroy its foundations as to leave very little that is coherent or trustworthy behind; but that, on the other hand, anyone who admits the possibility of a divine self-disclosure will find the record of Jesus as a whole, both of His teaching and His miraculous working, historically convincing. I say “as a whole,” not meaning to demand any infallibility in detail for our records, but only such trustworthiness as is asked for in ordinary history believed to be circumstantially credible. What I ask of you, then, is that, when you demand free historical criticism, you should take care that the presuppositions of your criticism are not arbitrary.

(b) Nor is it reasonable to seek to substitute a general for a particular self-disclosure of God—to say that one can in a general sense believe that God is manifested in the universe of things and in the universal thought of man, but that one cannot reasonably believe that a revelation of the truth most needed by man could have been given through the narrow channel of one little race and reached finality in one person. This is not a protest which can be based on general observation. For, so far as the story of evolution lies before us, it is a fact of frequent occurrence that things most needed for man, physically and mentally, appear and are developed in one place and among one race, and thence spread to become a universal inheritance. No one, I trust, wishes to deny that there is truth in speaking of a universal self-revelation of God. But you must recognize that particular races appear as “chosen races” in the sense that they have some special aptitude, as for government, or for the expression of beauty in art, or for science, so that some universal need of mankind found satisfaction first among them and spread thence to mankind at large. Does not Israel, then, including the Christ, in fact display a special genius for religion? Is there anything of value in any national tradition of religion or any individual message of any human prophet, which is not either already comprised in the religion of Christ as you find it in the New Testament, or such that it cannot easily and naturally be assimilated? Is it not true that Christianity supersedes all other religions by its very nature—not by excluding but by including the elements of truth which they all contain?

Certainly Christianity, in virtue of its essential idea, claims to be final. There is no relation of God to man or of man to God which can be imagined closer and completer than the Christian faith assumes to exist in Jesus and by Him to be made available for mankind. The language of finality is essential to Christianity. But the consummate thing, at that point in history finally given, whether as it concerns God or as it concerns man, is so rich that it must take all nations and periods to exhaust its significance. The final object, which we are bidden to contemplate in the New Testament, is only the starting-point of a new creation, which is a process as gradual as was the old. A man who believes the fundamental Christian creed as valid for all time, must still look round on the world to-day, and wonder whether mankind can even be said to have begun in earnest to estimate and exhaust its implications.

(c) It is an objection of a quite different kind which rejects Christianity, not because it is so ancient and conservative, but on the contrary because it presents such a bewildering variety of churches and creeds. But, again, it is not worthy of a rational mind to make this fact (so far as it is a fact) an excuse for a refusal to give serious consideration to the central claim that the Christian Church is, in spite of all its faults and failures, the carrier of the truth about God and man. You must take the facts of human history as they are. We find the best elements in humanity, such as liberty or justice, strangely misrepresented and abused by their official organs. Grievous faults and excesses and exaggerated claims and resultant revolts and conflicts are lamentable facts in the life of the Christian Church; so much so that the surface of its history does often appear to discredit it, just as the surface of human history discredits any lofty claim of any kind made for mankind. But it is the negation of wisdom to refuse to hunt for the spiritual treasure, because it is hid in a field thick with weeds. It is childish petulance to say that I will only welcome truth if it is easily discovered. It cannot be denied that human unfaithfulness has, in the tradition of the centuries, grievously mishandled Christian ideas, and has often tied them to some transitory phase of human science so that it is a laborious task to disentangle essential Christianity. But those who cannot undertake this task for themselves can at least fix upon some teacher who seems to be both morally worthy and intellectually capable, who has devoted himself to the task of presenting essential Christianity in a form which does not present needless hindrances to the modern spirit, and can make a frank study of his presentation, and compare it with what he reads for himself in the books of the New Testament, and think again before they come to the conclusion that Christianity is antiquated.

There is an objection, as deep as any which hinders men from welcoming the Christian Gospel, which is in effect that it is too good to be true—that the Christian optimism cannot be reconciled with the grim and repulsive aspects of nature, so as to let us believe that the God of nature is really the Father of Jesus Christ; but this shall be left for consideration in the lecture that follows.

It is obvious that in the latter part of this lecture I have been compressing into a very short compass considerations which need to be much more fully developed, which, in fact, I have endeavoured to develop elsewhere.23 But it is not my object in these lectures to present an apologetic in detail. What I have attempted is to re-draw the various pictures of the good life which have prevailed among men, under the influence of great prophets and seers. I have pointed to the divine background which they all in common postulate. I have sought among their diverse creeds to vindicate Christianity as the noblest form of ethical monotheism, to bring out into distinctness its intellectual postulates, and to establish their rationality as superior to anything which is offered us by any other faith or philosophy. I have not claimed to be able to demonstrate the truth of Christianity or to demonstrate the fundamental postulates of idealism. I believe that when we get down to the foundations, or back to the ultimates, of human thought or life, we are confronted with the necessity of a fundamental faith. And it is the place of faith in reason—I do not say over against reason but in reason—which must be our last subject for consideration.

APPENDED NOTE ON THE ARGUMENT FROM RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Religious experience shows that certain specific beliefs have permanently and greatly elevated human nature and augmented its capacity. It is therefore, I think, legitimate to argue that the beliefs in question must have “something in them” or must really have brought the believers into fresh touch with reality. There is, therefore, a legitimate argument from effectiveness to truth. But it is only legitimate so far as it rids our minds of prejudice against the “evidences” of some particular creed. Christianity, for example, as being a religion profoundly based on historical events, can never appeal to spiritual experience as if that could be a substitute for historical evidence, if it be admitted that this has been weakened or destroyed by criticism.

For (1) there can be no “verification” of past historical events by subsequent spiritual experience comparable to the verification of scientific hypotheses or discoveries by subsequent experiment. I am sure that Tennant’s criticism of Mr. Spens’s Belief and Practice is justified on this point; see Philos. Theol., vol. i, pp. 331 f.

(2) Subsequent religious experience can provide no substitute for the original historical testimony, if that is supposed to be inadequate. There again Bishop Arthur Chandler’s criticism of Mr. Spens in Christian Religious Experience (Longmans), pp. 17 ff., is fully justified. The Christian experience is always based upon and conditioned by a postulate of historical truth.

(3) No spiritual idea or practice can gain a right to become an authoritative part of the Christian creed or system merely because it shows spiritual effectiveness. In fact ideas and practices of the most contradictory kinds have shown spiritual effectiveness.

All that it seems to me even widespread and long-continued spiritual experience can do is to open our minds to give a welcome to whatever evidence is forthcoming for the doctrine or statements of fact on which the experience is based.

• 1.

  Rep. 382 E; see above, p. 11, n. 1.

• 2.

  Prov. xx. 27.

• 3.

  See quotations in Lightfoot’s Philippians, p. 278.

• 4.

  Wisd. i. 7; vii. 27.

• 5.

  “Well, Socrates, then I will tell you my difficulty… For I dare say that you feel as I do, how very hard or almost impossible is the attainment of any certainty about questions such as these in the present life. And yet I should deem him a coward who did not test what is said to the uttermost, or whose heart failed him before he had examined them on every side. For he should persevere until he has obtained one of two things: either he should learn or discover the truth about them; or, if this is impossible, I would have him take the best and most irrefragable of human words, and let this be the raft upon which he sails through life—not without risk, as I admit—if he cannot find some word of God which will more surely and safely carry him” (Plato, Phaedo, 85 (Jowett’s trans., slightly altered)).

• 6.

  That it is not only religious prophets, but poets and artists also, who must be recognized as in some sense “inspired,” see below, p. 306.

• 7.

  Philosophical Theology, vol. i, cap xii, pp. 306, 325 ff.; see also vol. ii, pp. 225 ff. It is a disappointment to me to confess that one to whom I owe so great an obligation as I owe to Dr. Tennant deserts me here; but, in spite of qualifications and hesitations expressed, this seems to be his conclusion.

• 8.

  Tertullian, de Animâ, c. 18. John Henry Newman’s real contribution to recent philosophy seems to me to have lain in his strong insistence upon this principle, against the rationalism of his day.

• 9.

  On the validity of such argument from religious experience see below, p. 313.

• 10.

  I Cor. viii. 6; 2 Cor. viii. 9; assumed to be earlier than Col. i or Phil. 2.

• 11.

  See Lightfoot on Gal. i. 16; cf. 12.

• 12.

  At the end of James B. Mozley’s essay on Blanco White (in his collected Essays Historical and Theological, vol. ii, Rivington’s, 1878), there is a grand presentation of the contrasted ideas of discovery and revelation.

• 13.

  A phrase which appears in St. Chrysostom (Θάτερον τοῦ Θεοῦ); see Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 184.

• 14.

  Mic. vi. 3; cf. Moffatt.

• 15.

  Luke xii. 57.

• 16.

  Apoc. xix. 2.

• 17.

  E.g., can we say that the word of God through the prophets is supernatural and the clearest intimations of conscience merely natural? Or can we dare to limit grace—which means only at bottom the activity of the Holy Spirit—within any specific channels or limits?

• 18.

  It is satisfactory to notice the recovery of modern scientific thought from pure subjectivism: see Whitehead’s Process and Reality, pp. 102, 106, 159, 210 ff. With reference to spiritual realities, see Eddington’s Nature of the Physical World, p. 332 (4) and elsewhere.

• 19.

  I believe H. S. Holland to have been the first to use this phrase; see the Philosophy of Faith, edited by Wilfrid Richmond, p. 102. On the whole subject I may refer to The Reconstruction of Belief, pp. 102 ff.

• 20.

  Tennant, Miracle and its Philosophical Presuppositions.

• 21.

  Hobson, op. cit., p. 490.

• 22.

  This idea is not so modern as is supposed. Rousseau exclaimed: “Ôtez les miracles de l’Évangile, et toute la terre est aux pieds de Jésus-Christ” (Lettres de la Montagne, iii).

• 23.

  In Reconstruction of Belief, B. i, capp. vii-xi.