Chapter I. Preliminary Considerations.I. Reasonsa priorifor expecting a Revelation from God.1.Needs of man's nature.Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs:“Renown is loud,”he says,“and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.”Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, orthisworld, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen orotherworld.”(b)VersusSocrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically[pg 112]most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths:“Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.”Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.”See also Flint, Theism, 305.(c)VersusThomas Paine:“Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.”Plato, Laws, 9:854,c, for substance:“Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.”Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.”Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered“until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.”Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says:“Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comestomen, yes,intomen.”We are sinful, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.”In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.B. Historical proof.—(a) The knowledge of moral and religious truth possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is grossly and increasingly imperfect. (b) Man's actual condition in ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme moral depravity. (c) With this depravity is found a general conviction of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after, and hope of, aid from above.Pythagoras:“It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.”Socrates:“Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.”Plato:“We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.”Disciple of Plato:“Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.”Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for“a more sure word of prophecy”(2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.2.Presumption of supply.What we know of God, by nature, affords ground for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We argue this:(a) From our necessary conviction of God's wisdom. Having made man a spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish the means needed to secure these ends. (b) From the actual, though incomplete,[pg 113]revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish the work he has begun. (c) From the general connection of want and supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the highest want will be all the more surely met. (d) From analogies of nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan's escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and“danced for joy upon the brig o' Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan's influence, he came also to believe that“God meant that we should know him.”In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother's heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother's sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God's distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man's being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.”(c) R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.”(d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch's treatise“De Sera Numinis Vindicta”is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just.“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,”is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; seeJob 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?”24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?”The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God's goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. CompareActs 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”;17:25-27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”;Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”;3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”;Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.”See Hackett's edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.We conclude this section upon the reasonsa priorifor expecting a revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that, while[pg 114]conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not, from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God's own voice, assuring him of“redemption ... the forgiveness of ... trespasses”(Eph. 1:7) and revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered possible.Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says:“Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.”We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God's goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God's holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren:“Does God's love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”II. Marks of the Revelation man may expect.1.As to its substance.We may expect this later revelation not to contradict, but to confirm and enlarge, the knowledge of God which we derive from nature, while it remedies the defects of natural religion and throws light upon its problems.Isaiah's appeal is to God's previous communications of truth:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”And Malachi follows the example of Isaiah;Mal. 4:4—“Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.”Our Lord himself based his claims upon the former utterances of God:Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”2.As to its method.We may expect it to follow God's methods of procedure in other communications of truth.Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there is any possibility of judginga priorihow a divine revelation will be given.“We are in no sort judges beforehand,”he says,“by what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.”But Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv) shows that God's progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for example as those mentioned below.Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust. James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever produced.’So J. H. Newman's‘kill or cure’argument is essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument, like Butler's, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to belief.”To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between God's methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature becomes an argument in favor of the former.(a) That of continuous historical development,—that it will be given in germ to early ages, and will be more fully unfolded as the race is prepared to receive it.Instances of continuous development in God's impartations are found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the progressive education of the individual[pg 115]and of the race. No other religion but Christianity shows“a steady historical progress of the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man through a period of many centuries.”See sermon by Dr. Temple, on the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown's Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would not kindle anything.(b) That of original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may through them be communicated to mankind.Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and law, so the Hebrew nation had a“genius for religion”(Renan); this last, however, would have been useless without special divine aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later still, the Talmud and the Koran.The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second time into the lions' den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father's house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him. On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns successful to his father's house, and his little dog goes in with him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and, when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him, went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the influence of environment nor a native genius for religion furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame on Elijah's altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression of their life we“must look beneath the surface, in the soul, where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face with God”(Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason, and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it was the Greeks who wrote.”Aristotle was the beginner of science, and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to every other.Acts 17:26—God“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”;Rom. 3:12—“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.”God's choice of the Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific, governmental truth.Hegel:“No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the world's history has ever issued from the simple development of a single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship. There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed forces.”The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek, the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton, must all be united to form a perfect whole.“While the Greek church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic;[pg 116]while the Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.”Brereton, in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of society; that of America, capital and labor.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however, awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.”The hour strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God's will in nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who interprets God's will in morals and religion. The few grains of wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer's field, there came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive Theology.(c) That of preservation in written and accessible documents, handed down from those to whom the revelation is first communicated.Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the history of the past; all the great religions of the world are book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P. Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of their religion. He called them a‘book-people,’and endeavored to construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and history.”The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand, makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke, Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives us the Bible.”Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents. Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73-96, 281-304.3.As to its attestation.We may expect that this revelation will be accompanied by evidence that its author is the same being whom we have previously recognized as God of nature. This evidence must constitute (a) a manifestation of God himself; (b) in the outward as well as the inward world; (c) such as only God's power or knowledge can make; and (d) such as cannot be counterfeited by the evil, or mistaken by the candid, soul. In short, we may expect God to attest by miracles and by prophecy, the divine mission and authority of those to whom he communicates a revelation. Some such outward sign would seem to be necessary, not only to assure the original recipient that the supposed revelation is not a vagary of his own imagination, but also to render the revelation received by a single individual authoritative to all (compare Judges 6:17, 36-40—Gideon asks a sign, for himself; 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah asks a sign, for others).[pg 117]But in order that our positive proof of a divine revelation may not be embarrassed by the suspicion that the miraculous and prophetic elements in the Scripture history create a presumption against its credibility, it will be desirable to take up at this point the general subject of miracles and prophecy.
Chapter I. Preliminary Considerations.I. Reasonsa priorifor expecting a Revelation from God.1.Needs of man's nature.Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs:“Renown is loud,”he says,“and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.”Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, orthisworld, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen orotherworld.”(b)VersusSocrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically[pg 112]most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths:“Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.”Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.”See also Flint, Theism, 305.(c)VersusThomas Paine:“Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.”Plato, Laws, 9:854,c, for substance:“Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.”Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.”Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered“until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.”Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says:“Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comestomen, yes,intomen.”We are sinful, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.”In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.B. Historical proof.—(a) The knowledge of moral and religious truth possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is grossly and increasingly imperfect. (b) Man's actual condition in ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme moral depravity. (c) With this depravity is found a general conviction of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after, and hope of, aid from above.Pythagoras:“It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.”Socrates:“Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.”Plato:“We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.”Disciple of Plato:“Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.”Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for“a more sure word of prophecy”(2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.2.Presumption of supply.What we know of God, by nature, affords ground for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We argue this:(a) From our necessary conviction of God's wisdom. Having made man a spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish the means needed to secure these ends. (b) From the actual, though incomplete,[pg 113]revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish the work he has begun. (c) From the general connection of want and supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the highest want will be all the more surely met. (d) From analogies of nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan's escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and“danced for joy upon the brig o' Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan's influence, he came also to believe that“God meant that we should know him.”In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother's heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother's sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God's distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man's being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.”(c) R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.”(d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch's treatise“De Sera Numinis Vindicta”is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just.“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,”is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; seeJob 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?”24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?”The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God's goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. CompareActs 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”;17:25-27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”;Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”;3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”;Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.”See Hackett's edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.We conclude this section upon the reasonsa priorifor expecting a revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that, while[pg 114]conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not, from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God's own voice, assuring him of“redemption ... the forgiveness of ... trespasses”(Eph. 1:7) and revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered possible.Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says:“Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.”We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God's goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God's holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren:“Does God's love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”II. Marks of the Revelation man may expect.1.As to its substance.We may expect this later revelation not to contradict, but to confirm and enlarge, the knowledge of God which we derive from nature, while it remedies the defects of natural religion and throws light upon its problems.Isaiah's appeal is to God's previous communications of truth:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”And Malachi follows the example of Isaiah;Mal. 4:4—“Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.”Our Lord himself based his claims upon the former utterances of God:Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”2.As to its method.We may expect it to follow God's methods of procedure in other communications of truth.Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there is any possibility of judginga priorihow a divine revelation will be given.“We are in no sort judges beforehand,”he says,“by what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.”But Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv) shows that God's progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for example as those mentioned below.Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust. James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever produced.’So J. H. Newman's‘kill or cure’argument is essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument, like Butler's, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to belief.”To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between God's methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature becomes an argument in favor of the former.(a) That of continuous historical development,—that it will be given in germ to early ages, and will be more fully unfolded as the race is prepared to receive it.Instances of continuous development in God's impartations are found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the progressive education of the individual[pg 115]and of the race. No other religion but Christianity shows“a steady historical progress of the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man through a period of many centuries.”See sermon by Dr. Temple, on the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown's Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would not kindle anything.(b) That of original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may through them be communicated to mankind.Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and law, so the Hebrew nation had a“genius for religion”(Renan); this last, however, would have been useless without special divine aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later still, the Talmud and the Koran.The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second time into the lions' den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father's house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him. On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns successful to his father's house, and his little dog goes in with him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and, when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him, went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the influence of environment nor a native genius for religion furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame on Elijah's altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression of their life we“must look beneath the surface, in the soul, where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face with God”(Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason, and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it was the Greeks who wrote.”Aristotle was the beginner of science, and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to every other.Acts 17:26—God“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”;Rom. 3:12—“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.”God's choice of the Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific, governmental truth.Hegel:“No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the world's history has ever issued from the simple development of a single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship. There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed forces.”The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek, the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton, must all be united to form a perfect whole.“While the Greek church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic;[pg 116]while the Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.”Brereton, in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of society; that of America, capital and labor.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however, awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.”The hour strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God's will in nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who interprets God's will in morals and religion. The few grains of wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer's field, there came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive Theology.(c) That of preservation in written and accessible documents, handed down from those to whom the revelation is first communicated.Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the history of the past; all the great religions of the world are book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P. Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of their religion. He called them a‘book-people,’and endeavored to construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and history.”The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand, makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke, Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives us the Bible.”Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents. Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73-96, 281-304.3.As to its attestation.We may expect that this revelation will be accompanied by evidence that its author is the same being whom we have previously recognized as God of nature. This evidence must constitute (a) a manifestation of God himself; (b) in the outward as well as the inward world; (c) such as only God's power or knowledge can make; and (d) such as cannot be counterfeited by the evil, or mistaken by the candid, soul. In short, we may expect God to attest by miracles and by prophecy, the divine mission and authority of those to whom he communicates a revelation. Some such outward sign would seem to be necessary, not only to assure the original recipient that the supposed revelation is not a vagary of his own imagination, but also to render the revelation received by a single individual authoritative to all (compare Judges 6:17, 36-40—Gideon asks a sign, for himself; 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah asks a sign, for others).[pg 117]But in order that our positive proof of a divine revelation may not be embarrassed by the suspicion that the miraculous and prophetic elements in the Scripture history create a presumption against its credibility, it will be desirable to take up at this point the general subject of miracles and prophecy.
Chapter I. Preliminary Considerations.I. Reasonsa priorifor expecting a Revelation from God.1.Needs of man's nature.Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs:“Renown is loud,”he says,“and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.”Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, orthisworld, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen orotherworld.”(b)VersusSocrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically[pg 112]most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths:“Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.”Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.”See also Flint, Theism, 305.(c)VersusThomas Paine:“Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.”Plato, Laws, 9:854,c, for substance:“Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.”Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.”Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered“until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.”Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says:“Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comestomen, yes,intomen.”We are sinful, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.”In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.B. Historical proof.—(a) The knowledge of moral and religious truth possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is grossly and increasingly imperfect. (b) Man's actual condition in ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme moral depravity. (c) With this depravity is found a general conviction of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after, and hope of, aid from above.Pythagoras:“It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.”Socrates:“Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.”Plato:“We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.”Disciple of Plato:“Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.”Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for“a more sure word of prophecy”(2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.2.Presumption of supply.What we know of God, by nature, affords ground for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We argue this:(a) From our necessary conviction of God's wisdom. Having made man a spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish the means needed to secure these ends. (b) From the actual, though incomplete,[pg 113]revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish the work he has begun. (c) From the general connection of want and supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the highest want will be all the more surely met. (d) From analogies of nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan's escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and“danced for joy upon the brig o' Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan's influence, he came also to believe that“God meant that we should know him.”In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother's heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother's sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God's distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man's being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.”(c) R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.”(d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch's treatise“De Sera Numinis Vindicta”is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just.“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,”is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; seeJob 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?”24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?”The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God's goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. CompareActs 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”;17:25-27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”;Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”;3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”;Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.”See Hackett's edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.We conclude this section upon the reasonsa priorifor expecting a revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that, while[pg 114]conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not, from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God's own voice, assuring him of“redemption ... the forgiveness of ... trespasses”(Eph. 1:7) and revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered possible.Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says:“Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.”We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God's goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God's holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren:“Does God's love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”II. Marks of the Revelation man may expect.1.As to its substance.We may expect this later revelation not to contradict, but to confirm and enlarge, the knowledge of God which we derive from nature, while it remedies the defects of natural religion and throws light upon its problems.Isaiah's appeal is to God's previous communications of truth:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”And Malachi follows the example of Isaiah;Mal. 4:4—“Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.”Our Lord himself based his claims upon the former utterances of God:Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”2.As to its method.We may expect it to follow God's methods of procedure in other communications of truth.Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there is any possibility of judginga priorihow a divine revelation will be given.“We are in no sort judges beforehand,”he says,“by what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.”But Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv) shows that God's progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for example as those mentioned below.Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust. James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever produced.’So J. H. Newman's‘kill or cure’argument is essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument, like Butler's, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to belief.”To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between God's methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature becomes an argument in favor of the former.(a) That of continuous historical development,—that it will be given in germ to early ages, and will be more fully unfolded as the race is prepared to receive it.Instances of continuous development in God's impartations are found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the progressive education of the individual[pg 115]and of the race. No other religion but Christianity shows“a steady historical progress of the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man through a period of many centuries.”See sermon by Dr. Temple, on the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown's Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would not kindle anything.(b) That of original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may through them be communicated to mankind.Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and law, so the Hebrew nation had a“genius for religion”(Renan); this last, however, would have been useless without special divine aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later still, the Talmud and the Koran.The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second time into the lions' den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father's house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him. On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns successful to his father's house, and his little dog goes in with him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and, when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him, went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the influence of environment nor a native genius for religion furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame on Elijah's altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression of their life we“must look beneath the surface, in the soul, where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face with God”(Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason, and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it was the Greeks who wrote.”Aristotle was the beginner of science, and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to every other.Acts 17:26—God“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”;Rom. 3:12—“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.”God's choice of the Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific, governmental truth.Hegel:“No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the world's history has ever issued from the simple development of a single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship. There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed forces.”The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek, the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton, must all be united to form a perfect whole.“While the Greek church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic;[pg 116]while the Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.”Brereton, in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of society; that of America, capital and labor.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however, awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.”The hour strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God's will in nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who interprets God's will in morals and religion. The few grains of wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer's field, there came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive Theology.(c) That of preservation in written and accessible documents, handed down from those to whom the revelation is first communicated.Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the history of the past; all the great religions of the world are book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P. Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of their religion. He called them a‘book-people,’and endeavored to construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and history.”The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand, makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke, Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives us the Bible.”Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents. Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73-96, 281-304.3.As to its attestation.We may expect that this revelation will be accompanied by evidence that its author is the same being whom we have previously recognized as God of nature. This evidence must constitute (a) a manifestation of God himself; (b) in the outward as well as the inward world; (c) such as only God's power or knowledge can make; and (d) such as cannot be counterfeited by the evil, or mistaken by the candid, soul. In short, we may expect God to attest by miracles and by prophecy, the divine mission and authority of those to whom he communicates a revelation. Some such outward sign would seem to be necessary, not only to assure the original recipient that the supposed revelation is not a vagary of his own imagination, but also to render the revelation received by a single individual authoritative to all (compare Judges 6:17, 36-40—Gideon asks a sign, for himself; 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah asks a sign, for others).[pg 117]But in order that our positive proof of a divine revelation may not be embarrassed by the suspicion that the miraculous and prophetic elements in the Scripture history create a presumption against its credibility, it will be desirable to take up at this point the general subject of miracles and prophecy.
Chapter I. Preliminary Considerations.I. Reasonsa priorifor expecting a Revelation from God.1.Needs of man's nature.Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs:“Renown is loud,”he says,“and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.”Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, orthisworld, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen orotherworld.”(b)VersusSocrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically[pg 112]most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths:“Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.”Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.”See also Flint, Theism, 305.(c)VersusThomas Paine:“Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.”Plato, Laws, 9:854,c, for substance:“Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.”Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.”Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered“until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.”Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says:“Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comestomen, yes,intomen.”We are sinful, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.”In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.B. Historical proof.—(a) The knowledge of moral and religious truth possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is grossly and increasingly imperfect. (b) Man's actual condition in ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme moral depravity. (c) With this depravity is found a general conviction of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after, and hope of, aid from above.Pythagoras:“It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.”Socrates:“Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.”Plato:“We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.”Disciple of Plato:“Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.”Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for“a more sure word of prophecy”(2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.2.Presumption of supply.What we know of God, by nature, affords ground for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We argue this:(a) From our necessary conviction of God's wisdom. Having made man a spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish the means needed to secure these ends. (b) From the actual, though incomplete,[pg 113]revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish the work he has begun. (c) From the general connection of want and supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the highest want will be all the more surely met. (d) From analogies of nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan's escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and“danced for joy upon the brig o' Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan's influence, he came also to believe that“God meant that we should know him.”In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother's heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother's sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God's distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man's being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.”(c) R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.”(d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch's treatise“De Sera Numinis Vindicta”is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just.“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,”is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; seeJob 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?”24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?”The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God's goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. CompareActs 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”;17:25-27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”;Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”;3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”;Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.”See Hackett's edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.We conclude this section upon the reasonsa priorifor expecting a revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that, while[pg 114]conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not, from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God's own voice, assuring him of“redemption ... the forgiveness of ... trespasses”(Eph. 1:7) and revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered possible.Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says:“Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.”We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God's goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God's holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren:“Does God's love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”II. Marks of the Revelation man may expect.1.As to its substance.We may expect this later revelation not to contradict, but to confirm and enlarge, the knowledge of God which we derive from nature, while it remedies the defects of natural religion and throws light upon its problems.Isaiah's appeal is to God's previous communications of truth:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”And Malachi follows the example of Isaiah;Mal. 4:4—“Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.”Our Lord himself based his claims upon the former utterances of God:Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”2.As to its method.We may expect it to follow God's methods of procedure in other communications of truth.Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there is any possibility of judginga priorihow a divine revelation will be given.“We are in no sort judges beforehand,”he says,“by what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.”But Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv) shows that God's progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for example as those mentioned below.Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust. James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever produced.’So J. H. Newman's‘kill or cure’argument is essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument, like Butler's, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to belief.”To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between God's methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature becomes an argument in favor of the former.(a) That of continuous historical development,—that it will be given in germ to early ages, and will be more fully unfolded as the race is prepared to receive it.Instances of continuous development in God's impartations are found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the progressive education of the individual[pg 115]and of the race. No other religion but Christianity shows“a steady historical progress of the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man through a period of many centuries.”See sermon by Dr. Temple, on the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown's Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would not kindle anything.(b) That of original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may through them be communicated to mankind.Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and law, so the Hebrew nation had a“genius for religion”(Renan); this last, however, would have been useless without special divine aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later still, the Talmud and the Koran.The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second time into the lions' den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father's house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him. On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns successful to his father's house, and his little dog goes in with him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and, when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him, went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the influence of environment nor a native genius for religion furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame on Elijah's altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression of their life we“must look beneath the surface, in the soul, where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face with God”(Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason, and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it was the Greeks who wrote.”Aristotle was the beginner of science, and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to every other.Acts 17:26—God“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”;Rom. 3:12—“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.”God's choice of the Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific, governmental truth.Hegel:“No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the world's history has ever issued from the simple development of a single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship. There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed forces.”The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek, the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton, must all be united to form a perfect whole.“While the Greek church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic;[pg 116]while the Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.”Brereton, in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of society; that of America, capital and labor.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however, awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.”The hour strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God's will in nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who interprets God's will in morals and religion. The few grains of wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer's field, there came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive Theology.(c) That of preservation in written and accessible documents, handed down from those to whom the revelation is first communicated.Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the history of the past; all the great religions of the world are book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P. Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of their religion. He called them a‘book-people,’and endeavored to construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and history.”The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand, makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke, Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives us the Bible.”Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents. Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73-96, 281-304.3.As to its attestation.We may expect that this revelation will be accompanied by evidence that its author is the same being whom we have previously recognized as God of nature. This evidence must constitute (a) a manifestation of God himself; (b) in the outward as well as the inward world; (c) such as only God's power or knowledge can make; and (d) such as cannot be counterfeited by the evil, or mistaken by the candid, soul. In short, we may expect God to attest by miracles and by prophecy, the divine mission and authority of those to whom he communicates a revelation. Some such outward sign would seem to be necessary, not only to assure the original recipient that the supposed revelation is not a vagary of his own imagination, but also to render the revelation received by a single individual authoritative to all (compare Judges 6:17, 36-40—Gideon asks a sign, for himself; 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah asks a sign, for others).[pg 117]But in order that our positive proof of a divine revelation may not be embarrassed by the suspicion that the miraculous and prophetic elements in the Scripture history create a presumption against its credibility, it will be desirable to take up at this point the general subject of miracles and prophecy.
I. Reasonsa priorifor expecting a Revelation from God.1.Needs of man's nature.Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs:“Renown is loud,”he says,“and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.”Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, orthisworld, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen orotherworld.”(b)VersusSocrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically[pg 112]most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths:“Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.”Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.”See also Flint, Theism, 305.(c)VersusThomas Paine:“Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.”Plato, Laws, 9:854,c, for substance:“Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.”Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.”Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered“until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.”Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says:“Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comestomen, yes,intomen.”We are sinful, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.”In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.B. Historical proof.—(a) The knowledge of moral and religious truth possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is grossly and increasingly imperfect. (b) Man's actual condition in ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme moral depravity. (c) With this depravity is found a general conviction of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after, and hope of, aid from above.Pythagoras:“It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.”Socrates:“Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.”Plato:“We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.”Disciple of Plato:“Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.”Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for“a more sure word of prophecy”(2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.2.Presumption of supply.What we know of God, by nature, affords ground for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We argue this:(a) From our necessary conviction of God's wisdom. Having made man a spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish the means needed to secure these ends. (b) From the actual, though incomplete,[pg 113]revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish the work he has begun. (c) From the general connection of want and supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the highest want will be all the more surely met. (d) From analogies of nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan's escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and“danced for joy upon the brig o' Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan's influence, he came also to believe that“God meant that we should know him.”In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother's heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother's sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God's distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man's being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.”(c) R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.”(d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch's treatise“De Sera Numinis Vindicta”is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just.“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,”is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; seeJob 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?”24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?”The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God's goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. CompareActs 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”;17:25-27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”;Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”;3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”;Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.”See Hackett's edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.We conclude this section upon the reasonsa priorifor expecting a revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that, while[pg 114]conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not, from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God's own voice, assuring him of“redemption ... the forgiveness of ... trespasses”(Eph. 1:7) and revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered possible.Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says:“Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.”We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God's goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God's holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren:“Does God's love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”
1.Needs of man's nature.Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.
A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.
(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs:“Renown is loud,”he says,“and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.”Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, orthisworld, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen orotherworld.”(b)VersusSocrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically[pg 112]most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths:“Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.”Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.”See also Flint, Theism, 305.(c)VersusThomas Paine:“Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.”Plato, Laws, 9:854,c, for substance:“Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.”Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.”Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered“until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.”Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says:“Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comestomen, yes,intomen.”We are sinful, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.”In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.
(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs:“Renown is loud,”he says,“and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.”Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, orthisworld, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen orotherworld.”
(b)VersusSocrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically[pg 112]most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths:“Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.”Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.”See also Flint, Theism, 305.
(c)VersusThomas Paine:“Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.”Plato, Laws, 9:854,c, for substance:“Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.”Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.”Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered“until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.”Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says:“Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comestomen, yes,intomen.”We are sinful, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.”In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.
B. Historical proof.—(a) The knowledge of moral and religious truth possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is grossly and increasingly imperfect. (b) Man's actual condition in ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme moral depravity. (c) With this depravity is found a general conviction of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after, and hope of, aid from above.
Pythagoras:“It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.”Socrates:“Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.”Plato:“We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.”Disciple of Plato:“Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.”Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for“a more sure word of prophecy”(2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.
Pythagoras:“It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.”Socrates:“Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.”Plato:“We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.”Disciple of Plato:“Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.”Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for“a more sure word of prophecy”(2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.
2.Presumption of supply.What we know of God, by nature, affords ground for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We argue this:
(a) From our necessary conviction of God's wisdom. Having made man a spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish the means needed to secure these ends. (b) From the actual, though incomplete,[pg 113]revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish the work he has begun. (c) From the general connection of want and supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the highest want will be all the more surely met. (d) From analogies of nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.
(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan's escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and“danced for joy upon the brig o' Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan's influence, he came also to believe that“God meant that we should know him.”In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother's heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother's sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God's distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man's being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.”(c) R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.”(d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch's treatise“De Sera Numinis Vindicta”is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just.“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,”is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; seeJob 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?”24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?”The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God's goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. CompareActs 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”;17:25-27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”;Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”;3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”;Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.”See Hackett's edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.
(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan's escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and“danced for joy upon the brig o' Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan's influence, he came also to believe that“God meant that we should know him.”In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother's heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother's sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God's distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man's being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.
(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.”(c) R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.”(d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch's treatise“De Sera Numinis Vindicta”is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just.“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,”is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.
The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; seeJob 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?”24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?”The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God's goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. CompareActs 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”;17:25-27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”;Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”;3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”;Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.”See Hackett's edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.
We conclude this section upon the reasonsa priorifor expecting a revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that, while[pg 114]conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not, from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God's own voice, assuring him of“redemption ... the forgiveness of ... trespasses”(Eph. 1:7) and revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered possible.
Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says:“Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.”We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God's goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God's holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren:“Does God's love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”
Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says:“Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.”We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God's goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God's holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren:“Does God's love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”
II. Marks of the Revelation man may expect.1.As to its substance.We may expect this later revelation not to contradict, but to confirm and enlarge, the knowledge of God which we derive from nature, while it remedies the defects of natural religion and throws light upon its problems.Isaiah's appeal is to God's previous communications of truth:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”And Malachi follows the example of Isaiah;Mal. 4:4—“Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.”Our Lord himself based his claims upon the former utterances of God:Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”2.As to its method.We may expect it to follow God's methods of procedure in other communications of truth.Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there is any possibility of judginga priorihow a divine revelation will be given.“We are in no sort judges beforehand,”he says,“by what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.”But Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv) shows that God's progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for example as those mentioned below.Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust. James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever produced.’So J. H. Newman's‘kill or cure’argument is essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument, like Butler's, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to belief.”To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between God's methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature becomes an argument in favor of the former.(a) That of continuous historical development,—that it will be given in germ to early ages, and will be more fully unfolded as the race is prepared to receive it.Instances of continuous development in God's impartations are found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the progressive education of the individual[pg 115]and of the race. No other religion but Christianity shows“a steady historical progress of the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man through a period of many centuries.”See sermon by Dr. Temple, on the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown's Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would not kindle anything.(b) That of original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may through them be communicated to mankind.Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and law, so the Hebrew nation had a“genius for religion”(Renan); this last, however, would have been useless without special divine aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later still, the Talmud and the Koran.The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second time into the lions' den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father's house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him. On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns successful to his father's house, and his little dog goes in with him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and, when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him, went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the influence of environment nor a native genius for religion furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame on Elijah's altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression of their life we“must look beneath the surface, in the soul, where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face with God”(Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason, and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it was the Greeks who wrote.”Aristotle was the beginner of science, and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to every other.Acts 17:26—God“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”;Rom. 3:12—“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.”God's choice of the Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific, governmental truth.Hegel:“No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the world's history has ever issued from the simple development of a single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship. There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed forces.”The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek, the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton, must all be united to form a perfect whole.“While the Greek church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic;[pg 116]while the Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.”Brereton, in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of society; that of America, capital and labor.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however, awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.”The hour strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God's will in nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who interprets God's will in morals and religion. The few grains of wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer's field, there came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive Theology.(c) That of preservation in written and accessible documents, handed down from those to whom the revelation is first communicated.Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the history of the past; all the great religions of the world are book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P. Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of their religion. He called them a‘book-people,’and endeavored to construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and history.”The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand, makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke, Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives us the Bible.”Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents. Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73-96, 281-304.3.As to its attestation.We may expect that this revelation will be accompanied by evidence that its author is the same being whom we have previously recognized as God of nature. This evidence must constitute (a) a manifestation of God himself; (b) in the outward as well as the inward world; (c) such as only God's power or knowledge can make; and (d) such as cannot be counterfeited by the evil, or mistaken by the candid, soul. In short, we may expect God to attest by miracles and by prophecy, the divine mission and authority of those to whom he communicates a revelation. Some such outward sign would seem to be necessary, not only to assure the original recipient that the supposed revelation is not a vagary of his own imagination, but also to render the revelation received by a single individual authoritative to all (compare Judges 6:17, 36-40—Gideon asks a sign, for himself; 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah asks a sign, for others).[pg 117]But in order that our positive proof of a divine revelation may not be embarrassed by the suspicion that the miraculous and prophetic elements in the Scripture history create a presumption against its credibility, it will be desirable to take up at this point the general subject of miracles and prophecy.
1.As to its substance.We may expect this later revelation not to contradict, but to confirm and enlarge, the knowledge of God which we derive from nature, while it remedies the defects of natural religion and throws light upon its problems.
Isaiah's appeal is to God's previous communications of truth:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”And Malachi follows the example of Isaiah;Mal. 4:4—“Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.”Our Lord himself based his claims upon the former utterances of God:Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”
Isaiah's appeal is to God's previous communications of truth:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”And Malachi follows the example of Isaiah;Mal. 4:4—“Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.”Our Lord himself based his claims upon the former utterances of God:Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”
2.As to its method.We may expect it to follow God's methods of procedure in other communications of truth.
Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there is any possibility of judginga priorihow a divine revelation will be given.“We are in no sort judges beforehand,”he says,“by what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.”But Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv) shows that God's progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for example as those mentioned below.Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust. James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever produced.’So J. H. Newman's‘kill or cure’argument is essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument, like Butler's, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to belief.”To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between God's methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature becomes an argument in favor of the former.
Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there is any possibility of judginga priorihow a divine revelation will be given.“We are in no sort judges beforehand,”he says,“by what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.”But Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv) shows that God's progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for example as those mentioned below.
Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust. James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever produced.’So J. H. Newman's‘kill or cure’argument is essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument, like Butler's, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to belief.”To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between God's methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature becomes an argument in favor of the former.
(a) That of continuous historical development,—that it will be given in germ to early ages, and will be more fully unfolded as the race is prepared to receive it.
Instances of continuous development in God's impartations are found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the progressive education of the individual[pg 115]and of the race. No other religion but Christianity shows“a steady historical progress of the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man through a period of many centuries.”See sermon by Dr. Temple, on the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown's Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would not kindle anything.
Instances of continuous development in God's impartations are found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the progressive education of the individual[pg 115]and of the race. No other religion but Christianity shows“a steady historical progress of the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man through a period of many centuries.”See sermon by Dr. Temple, on the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown's Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.”A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would not kindle anything.
(b) That of original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may through them be communicated to mankind.
Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and law, so the Hebrew nation had a“genius for religion”(Renan); this last, however, would have been useless without special divine aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later still, the Talmud and the Koran.The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second time into the lions' den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father's house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him. On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns successful to his father's house, and his little dog goes in with him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and, when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him, went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the influence of environment nor a native genius for religion furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame on Elijah's altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression of their life we“must look beneath the surface, in the soul, where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face with God”(Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason, and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it was the Greeks who wrote.”Aristotle was the beginner of science, and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to every other.Acts 17:26—God“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”;Rom. 3:12—“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.”God's choice of the Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific, governmental truth.Hegel:“No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the world's history has ever issued from the simple development of a single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship. There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed forces.”The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek, the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton, must all be united to form a perfect whole.“While the Greek church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic;[pg 116]while the Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.”Brereton, in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of society; that of America, capital and labor.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however, awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.”The hour strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God's will in nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who interprets God's will in morals and religion. The few grains of wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer's field, there came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive Theology.
Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and law, so the Hebrew nation had a“genius for religion”(Renan); this last, however, would have been useless without special divine aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later still, the Talmud and the Koran.
The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second time into the lions' den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father's house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him. On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns successful to his father's house, and his little dog goes in with him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and, when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him, went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the influence of environment nor a native genius for religion furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame on Elijah's altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.
The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression of their life we“must look beneath the surface, in the soul, where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face with God”(Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason, and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it was the Greeks who wrote.”Aristotle was the beginner of science, and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to every other.Acts 17:26—God“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”;Rom. 3:12—“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.”God's choice of the Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific, governmental truth.
Hegel:“No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the world's history has ever issued from the simple development of a single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship. There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed forces.”The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek, the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton, must all be united to form a perfect whole.“While the Greek church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic;[pg 116]while the Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.”Brereton, in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of society; that of America, capital and labor.”Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however, awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.”The hour strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God's will in nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who interprets God's will in morals and religion. The few grains of wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer's field, there came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive Theology.
(c) That of preservation in written and accessible documents, handed down from those to whom the revelation is first communicated.
Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the history of the past; all the great religions of the world are book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P. Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of their religion. He called them a‘book-people,’and endeavored to construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and history.”The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand, makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke, Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives us the Bible.”Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents. Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73-96, 281-304.
Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the history of the past; all the great religions of the world are book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P. Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of their religion. He called them a‘book-people,’and endeavored to construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and history.”The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand, makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke, Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives us the Bible.”Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents. Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73-96, 281-304.
3.As to its attestation.We may expect that this revelation will be accompanied by evidence that its author is the same being whom we have previously recognized as God of nature. This evidence must constitute (a) a manifestation of God himself; (b) in the outward as well as the inward world; (c) such as only God's power or knowledge can make; and (d) such as cannot be counterfeited by the evil, or mistaken by the candid, soul. In short, we may expect God to attest by miracles and by prophecy, the divine mission and authority of those to whom he communicates a revelation. Some such outward sign would seem to be necessary, not only to assure the original recipient that the supposed revelation is not a vagary of his own imagination, but also to render the revelation received by a single individual authoritative to all (compare Judges 6:17, 36-40—Gideon asks a sign, for himself; 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah asks a sign, for others).[pg 117]But in order that our positive proof of a divine revelation may not be embarrassed by the suspicion that the miraculous and prophetic elements in the Scripture history create a presumption against its credibility, it will be desirable to take up at this point the general subject of miracles and prophecy.