Philosophy and Religion / Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge

by Hastings Rashdall

LECTURE V

REVELATION

I have tried in previous lectures to show that the apprehension of religious truth does not depend upon some special kind of intuition; that it is not due to some special faculty superior to and different in kind from our ordinary intellectual activities, but to an exercise of the same intellectual faculties by which we attain to truth in other matters—including, however, especially the wholly unique faculty of immediately discerning values or pronouncing moral judgements. The word 'faith' should, as it seems to me, be used to express not a mysterious capacity for attaining to knowledge without thought or without evidence, but to indicate some of the manifold characteristics by which our religious knowledge is distinguished from the knowledge either of common life or of the physical Sciences. If I had time there would be much to be said about these characteristics, and I think I could show that the popular distinction between knowledge and religious {128} faith finds whatever real justification it possesses in these characteristics of religious knowledge. I might insist on the frequently implicit and unanalysed character of religious thinking; upon the incompleteness and inadequacy of even the fullest account that the maturest and acutest Philosopher can give of ultimate Reality; upon the merely probable and analogical character of much of the reasoning which is necessarily employed both in the most popular and in the most philosophical kinds of reasoning about such matters; and above all upon the prominent place which moral judgements occupy in religious thought, moral judgements which, on account of their immediate character and their emotional setting, are often not recognized in their true character as judgements of the Reason. Most of the mistakes into which popular thinking has fallen in this matter—the mistakes which culminate in the famous examination-paper definition of faith as 'a means of believing that which we know not to be true'—would be avoided if we would only remember, with St. Paul and most of the greater religious thinkers, that the true antithesis is not between faith and reason but between faith and sight. All religious belief implies a belief in something which cannot be touched or tasted or handled, and which cannot be established by any mere logical deduction from what can be touched or tasted or handled. So far from implying {129} scepticism as to the power of Reason, this opposition between faith and sight actually asserts the possibility of attaining by thought to a knowledge of realities which cannot be touched or tasted or handled—a knowledge of equal validity and trustworthiness with that which is popularly said to be due to the senses, though Plato has taught us once for all[1] that the senses by themselves never give us real knowledge, and that in the apprehension of the most ordinary matter of fact there is implied the action of the self-same intellect by which alone we can reach the knowledge of God.

It may further be pointed out that, though neither religious knowledge nor moral knowledge are mere emotion, they are both of them very closely connected with certain emotions. Great moral discoveries are made, not so much by superior intellectual power, as by superior interest in the subject-matter of Morality. Very ordinary intelligence can see, when it is really brought to bear upon the matter, the irrationality or immorality of bad customs, oppressions, social injustices; but the people who have led the revolt against these things have generally been the people who have felt intensely about them. So it is with the more distinctly religious knowledge. Religious thought and insight are largely dependent upon the emotions to which religious {130} ideas and beliefs appeal. The absence of religious thought and definite religious belief is very often (I am far from saying always) due to a want of interest in Religion; but that does not prove that religious thought is not the work of the intellect, any more than the fact that a man is ignorant of Politics because he takes no interest in Politics proves that political truth is a mere matter of emotion, and has nothing to do with the understanding. Thought is always guided by interest—a truth which must not be distorted with a certain modern school of thought, if indeed it can properly be called thought, into the assertion that thinking is nothing but willing, and that therefore we are at liberty to think just what we please.

And that leads on to a further point. Emotion and desire are very closely connected with the will. A man's moral insight and the development of his thought about moral questions depend very largely upon the extent to which he acts up to whatever light he has. Vice, as Aristotle put it, is phthartike arches—destructive of moral first principles. Moral insight is largely dependent upon character. And so is religious insight. Thus it is quite true to say that religious belief depends in part upon the state of the will. This doctrine has been so scandalously abused by many Theologians and Apologists that I use it with great hesitation. I have no sympathy {131} with the idea that we are justified in believing a religious doctrine merely because we wish it to be true, or with the insinuation that non-belief in a religious truth is always or necessarily due to moral obliquity. But still it is undeniable that a man's ethical and religious beliefs are to some extent affected by the state of his will. That is so with all knowledge to some extent; for progress in knowledge requires attention, and is largely dependent upon interest. If I take no interest in the properties of curves or the square root of -1, I am not very likely to make a good mathematician. This connexion of knowledge with interest applies in an exceptional degree to religious knowledge: and that is one of the points which I think many religious thinkers have intended to emphasize by their too hard and fast distinctions between faith and knowledge.

Belief itself is thus to some extent affected by the state of the will; and still more emphatically does the extent to which belief affects action depend upon the will. Many beliefs which we quite sincerely hold are what have been called 'otiose beliefs'; we do not by an effort of the will realize them sufficiently strongly for them to affect action. Many a man knows perfectly that his course of life will injure or destroy his physical health; it is not through intellectual scepticism that he disobeys his {132} physician's prescriptions, but because other desires and inclinations prevent his attending to them and acting upon them. It is obvious that to men like St. Paul and Luther faith meant much more than a mere state of the intellect; it included a certain emotional and a certain volitional attitude; it included love and it included obedience. Whether our intellectual beliefs about Religion are energetic enough to influence action, does to an enormous extent depend upon our wills. Faith is, then, used, and almost inevitably used, in such a great variety of senses that I do not like to lay down one definite and exclusive definition of it; but it would be safe to say that, for many purposes and in many connexions, religious faith means the deliberate adoption by an effort of the will, as practically certain for purposes of action and of feeling, of a religious belief which to the intellect is, or may be, merely probable. For purposes of life it is entirely reasonable to treat probabilities as certainties. If a man has reason to think his friend is trustworthy, he will do well to trust him wholly and implicitly. If a man has reason to think that a certain view of the Universe is the most probable one, he will do well habitually to allow that conviction to dominate not merely his actions, but the habitual tenour of his emotional and spiritual life. We should not love a human being much if we allowed ourselves habitually to {133} contemplate the logical possibility that the loved one was unworthy of, or irresponsive to, our affection. We could not love God if we habitually contemplated the fact that His existence rests for us upon judgements in which there is more or less possibility of error, though there is no reason why we should, in our speculative moments, claim a greater certainty for them than seems to be reasonable. The doctrine that 'probability is the guide of life' is one on which every sensible man habitually acts in all other relations of life: Bishop Butler was right in contending that it should be applied no less unhesitatingly to the matter of religious belief and religious aspiration.

The view which I have taken of the nature of faith may be illustrated by the position of Clement of Alexandria. It is clear from his writings that by faith he meant a kind of conviction falling short of demonstration or immediate intellectual insight, and dependent in part upon the state of the will and the heart. Clement did not disparage knowledge in the interests of faith: faith was to him a more elementary kind of knowledge resting largely upon moral conviction, and the foundation of that higher state of intellectual apprehension which he called Gnosis. I do not mean, of course, to adopt Clement's Philosophy as a whole; I merely refer to it as illustrating the point that, properly considered, faith is, or rather includes, a particular kind or stage {134} of knowledge, and is not a totally different and even opposite state of mind. It would be easy to show that this has been fully recognized by many, if not most, of the great Christian thinkers.

One last point. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the process by which psychologically a man arrives at a religious or other truth and the reasons which make it true. Because I deny that the truth of God's existence can reasonably be accepted on the basis of an immediate judgement or intuition, I do not deny for one moment that an apparently intuitive conviction of the truth of Christianity, as of other religions, actually exists. The religious belief of the vast majority of persons has always rested, and must always rest, very largely upon tradition, education, environment, authority of one kind or another—authority supported or confirmed by a varying measure of independent reflection or experience. And, just where the influence of authority is most complete and overwhelming, it is least felt to be authority. The person whose beliefs are most entirely produced by education or environment is very often most convinced that his opinions are due solely to his own immediate insight. But even where this is not the case—even where the religious man is taking a new departure, revolting against his environment and adopting a religious belief absolutely at variance with the established {135} belief of his society—I do not contend that such new religious ideas are always due to unobserved and unanalysed processes of reasoning. That in most cases, when a person adopts a new creed, he would himself give some reason for his change of faith is obvious, though the reason which he would allege would not in all cases be the one which really caused the change of religion. There may be other psychological influences which cause belief besides the influence of environment: in some cases the psychological causes of such beliefs are altogether beyond analysis. But, though I do not think M. Auguste Sabatier justified in assuming that a belief is true, and must come directly from God, simply because we cannot easily explain its genesis by the individual's environment and psychological antecedents, it is of extreme importance to insist that it is not proved to be false because it was not adopted primarily, or at all, on adequate theoretical grounds. A belief which arose at first entirely without logical justification, or it may be on intellectual grounds subsequently discovered to be inadequate or false, may nevertheless be one which can and does justify itself to the reflective intellect of the person himself or of other persons. And many new, true, and valuable beliefs have undoubtedly arisen in this way. Even in physical Science we all know that there is no Logic of discovery. It {136} is a familiar criticism upon the Logic of Bacon that he ignored or under-estimated the part that is played in scientific thinking by hypothesis, and the consequent need of scientific imagination. Very often the new scientific idea comes into the discoverer's mind, he knows not how or why. Some great man of Science—I think, Helmholtz—said of a brilliant discovery of his, 'It was given to me.' But it was not true because it came to Helmholtz in this way, but because it was subsequently verified and proved. Now, undoubtedly, religious beliefs, new and old, often do present themselves to the minds of individuals in an intuitive and unaccountable way. They may subsequently be justified at the bar of Reason: and yet Reason might never have discovered them for itself. They would never have come into the world unless they had presented themselves at first to some mind or other as intuitions, inspirations, immediate Revelations: and yet (once again) the fact that they so present themselves does not by itself prove them to be true.

I may perhaps illustrate what I mean by the analogy of Poetry. I suppose few people will push the sound-without-sense view of Poetry to the length of denying that poets do sometimes see and teach us truths. No one—least of all one who is not even a verse-maker himself—can, I suppose, analyse the intellectual process by which a poet {137} gets at his truths. The insight by which he arrives at them is closely connected with emotions of various kinds: and yet the truths are not themselves emotions, nor do they in all cases merely state the fact that the poet has felt such and such emotions. They are propositions about the nature of things, not merely about the poet's mental states. And yet the truths are not true because the poet feels them, as he would say—no matter how passionately he feels them. There is no separate organ of poetic truth: and not all the things that poets have passionately felt are true. Some highly poetical thoughts have been very false thoughts. But, if they are true, they must be true for good logical reasons, which a philosophical critic may even in some cases by subsequent reflection be able to disentangle and set forth. Yet the poet did not get at those truths by way of philosophical reflection: or, if he was led to them by any logical process, he could not have analysed his own reasoning. The poet could not have produced the arguments of the philosopher: the philosopher without the poet's lead might never have seen the truth. I am afraid I must not stay to defend or illustrate this position: I will only say that the poets I should most naturally go to for illustration would be such poets as Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though perhaps all three are a little {138} too consciously philosophic to supply the ideal illustration.

I do not think it will be difficult to apply these reflections to the case of religious and ethical truth. All religious truth, as I hold, depends logically upon inference; inference from the whole body of our experiences, among which the most important place is held by our immediate moral judgements. The truth of Theism is in that sense a truth discernible by Reason. But it does not follow that, when it was first discovered, it was arrived at by the inferences which I have endeavoured to some extent to analyse, or by one of the many lines of thought which may lead to the same conclusions. It was not the Greek philosophers so much as the Jewish prophets who taught the world true Monotheism. Hosea, Amos, the two Isaiahs probably arrived at their Monotheism largely by intuition; or (in so far as it was by inferential processes) the premisses of their argument were very probably inherited beliefs of earlier Judaism which would not commend themselves without qualification to a modern thinker. In its essentials the Monotheism of Isaiah is a reasonable belief; we accept it because it is reasonable, not because Isaiah had an intuition that it was true; for we have rejected many things which to Isaiah probably seemed no less self-evidently true. And yet it would be a profound mistake to assume that {139} the philosophers who now defend Isaiah's creed would ever have arrived at it without Isaiah's aid.

I hope that by this time you will have seen to some extent the spirit in which I am approaching the special subject of to-day's lecture—the question of Revelation. In some of the senses that have been given to it, the idea of Revelation is one which hardly any one trained in the school—that is to say, any school—of modern Philosophy is likely to accept. The idea that pieces of information have been supernaturally and without any employment of their own intellectual faculties communicated at various times to particular persons, their truth being guaranteed by miracles—in the sense of interruptions of the ordinary course of nature by an extraordinary fiat of creative power—is one which is already rejected by most modern theologians, even among those who would generally be called rather conservative theologians. I will not now argue the question whether any miraculous event, however well attested, could possibly be sufficient evidence for the truth of spiritual teaching given in attestation of it. I will merely remark that to any one who has really appreciated the meaning of biblical criticism, it is scarcely conceivable that the evidence for miracles could seem sufficiently cogent to constitute such an attestation. In proof of that I will merely appeal to the modest, apologetic, tentative tone in which {140} scholarly and sober-minded theologians who would usually be classed among the defenders of miracles—men like the Bishop of Ely or Professor Sanday of Oxford—are content to speak of such evidences. They admit the difficulty of proving that such miraculous events really happened thousands of years ago on the strength of narratives written at the very earliest fifty years after the alleged event, and they invite us rather to believe in the miracles on the evidence of a Revelation already accepted than to accept the revelation on the evidence of the miracles. I shall have a word to say on this question of miracles next time; but for the present I want to establish, or rather without much argument to put before you for your consideration, this position; that the idea of revelation cannot be admitted in the sense of a communication of truth by God, claiming to be accepted not on account of its own intrinsic reasonableness or of the intellectual or spiritual insight of the person to whom it is made, but on account of the historical evidence for miraculous occurrences said to have taken place in connexion with such communication. The most that can reasonably be contended for is that super-normal occurrences of this kind may possess a certain corroborative value in support of a Revelation claiming to be accepted on other grounds.

What place then is left for the idea of Revelation? {141} I will ask you to go back for a moment to the conclusions of our first lecture. We saw that from the idealistic point of view all knowledge may be looked upon as a partial communication to the human soul of the thoughts or experiences of the divine Mind. There is a sense then in which all truth is revealed truth. In a more important sense, and a sense more nearly allied to that of ordinary usage, all moral and spiritual truth may be regarded as revealed truth. And in particular those immediate judgements about good and evil in which we have found the sole means of knowing the divine character and purposes must be looked on as divinely implanted knowledge—none the less divinely implanted because it is, in the ordinary sense of the words, quite natural, normal, and consistent with law. Nobody but an Atheist ought to talk about the unassisted human intellect: no one who acquiesces in the old doctrine that Conscience is the voice of God ought either on the one hand to deny the existence of Revelation, or on the other to speak of Revelation as if it were confined to the Bible.

But because we ascribe some intrinsic power of judging about spiritual and moral matters to the ordinary human intellect, it would be a grievous mistake to assume that all men have an equal measure of this power. Because we assert that all moral and spiritual truth comes to men by {142} Revelation, it does not follow that there are not degrees of Revelation. And it is one of the special characteristics of religious and moral truth that it is in a peculiar degree dependent upon the superior insight of those exceptional men to whom have been accorded extraordinary degrees of moral and spiritual insight. Even in Science, as we have seen, we cannot dispense with genius: very ordinary men can satisfy themselves of the truth of a hypothesis when it is once suggested, though they would have been quite incompetent to discover that hypothesis for themselves. Still more unquestionably are there moral and spiritual truths which, when once discovered, can be seen to be true by men of very commonplace intellect and commonplace character. The truths are seen and passed on to others, who accept them partly on authority, by way of social inheritance and tradition; partly because they are confirmed in various degrees by their own independent judgement and experience. Here then—in the discovery of new spiritual truth—we encounter that higher and exceptional degree of spiritual and ethical insight which in a special and pre-eminent sense we ought to regard as Revelation or Inspiration. Here there is room, in the evolution of Religion and Morality, for the influence of the men of moral or religious genius—the Prophets, the Apostles, the Founders and Reformers of Religions: and, since {143} moral and spiritual insight are very closely connected with character, for the moral hero, the leader of men, the Saint. Especially to the new departures, the turning-points, the epoch-making discoveries in ethical and religious progress connected with the appearance of such men, we may apply the term Revelation in a supreme or culminating sense.

It is, as it seems to me, extremely important that we should not altogether divorce the idea of Revelation from those kinds of moral and religious truth which are arrived at by the ordinary working of the human intellect. The ultimate moral judgements no doubt must be intuitive or immediate, but in our deductions from them—in their application both to practical life and to theories about God and the Universe—there is room for much intellectual work of the kind which we commonly associate rather with the philosopher than with the prophet. But the philosopher may be also a prophet. The philosophically trained Greek Fathers were surely right in recognizing that men like Socrates and Plato were to be numbered among those to whom the Spirit of God had spoken in an exceptional degree. They too spoke in the power of the indwelling Logos. But still it is quite natural that we should associate the idea of Revelation or Inspiration more particularly with that kind of moral and intellectual discovery which comes to exceptional men by way {144} of apparent intuition or immediate insight. We associate the idea of inspiration rather with the poet than with the man of Science, and with the prophet rather than with the systematic philosopher. It is quite natural, therefore, that we should associate the idea of Revelation more especially with religious teachers of the intuitive order like the Jewish prophets than with even those philosophers who have also been great practical teachers of Ethics and Religion. But it is most important to recognize that there is no hard and fast line to be drawn between the two classes. The Jewish prophets did not arrive at their ideas about God without a great deal of hard thinking, though the thinking is for the most part unexplicit and the mode of expression poetic. 'Their idols are silver and gold; even the work of men's hands. . . . They have hands and handle not; feet have they and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.' There is real hard reasoning underlying such noble rhetoric, though the Psalmist could not perhaps have reduced his argument against Polytheism and Idolatry to the form of a dialectical argument like Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas. In the highest instance of all—the case of our Lord Jesus Christ himself—a natural instinct of reverence is apt to deter us from analysing how he came by the truth that he communicated to men; but, though I would not deny that the deepest {145} truth came to him chiefly by a supreme gift of intuition, there are obvious indications of profound intellectual thought in his teaching. Recall for a moment his arguments against the misuse of the Sabbath, against the superstition of unclean meats, against the Sadducean objection to the Resurrection. I want to avoid at present dogmatic phraseology; so I will only submit in passing that this is only what we should expect if the early Church was right in thinking of Christ as the supreme expression in the moral and religious sphere of the Logos or Reason of God.

The thought of great religious thinkers is none the less Revelation because it involves the use of their reasoning faculties. But I guarded myself against being supposed, in contending for the possibility of a philosophical or metaphysical knowledge of God, to assume that religious truth had always come to men in this way, or even that the greatest steps in religious progress have usually taken the form of explicit reasoning. Once again, it is all-important to distinguish between the way in which a belief comes to be entertained and the reasons for its being true. All sorts of psychological causes have contributed to generate religious beliefs. And when once we have discovered grounds in our own reflection or experience for believing them to be true, there is no reason why we should not regard all of them as {146} pieces of divine revelation. Visions and dreams, for instance, had a share in the development of religious ideas. We might even admit the possibility that the human race would never have been led to think of the immortality of the soul but for primitive ideas about ghosts suggested by the phenomena of dreams. The truth of the doctrine is neither proved nor disproved by such an account of its origin; but, if that belief is true and dreams have played a part in the process by which man has been led to it, no Theist surely can refuse to recognize the divine guidance therein. And so, at a higher level, we are told by the author of the Acts that St. Peter was led to accept the great principle of Gentile Christianity by the vision of a sheet let down from heaven. There is no reason why that account should not be historically true. The psychologist may very easily account for St. Peter's vision by the working in his mind of the liberal teaching of Stephen, the effect of his fast, and so on. But that does not prevent us recognizing that vision as an instrument of divine Revelation. We at the present day do not believe in this fundamental principle of Christianity because of that dream of St. Peter's; for we know that dreams are not always truth or always edifying. We believe in that principle on other grounds—the convincing grounds (among others) which St. Luke puts into St. Peter's mouth {147} on the following morning. But that need not prevent our recognizing that God may have communicated that truth to the men of that generation—and through them to us—partly by means of that dream.

The two principles then for which I wish to contend are these: (1) that Revelation is a matter of degree; (2) that no Revelation can be accepted in the long run merely because it came to a particular person in a peculiarly intuitive or immediate way. It may be that M. Auguste Sabatier is right in seeing the most immediate contact of God with the human soul in those intuitive convictions which can least easily be accounted for by ordinary psychological causes; in those new departures of religious insight, those unaccountable comings of new thoughts into the mind, which constitute the great crises or turning-points of religious history. But, though the coming of such thoughts may often be accepted by the individual as direct evidences of a divine origin, the Metaphysician, on looking back upon them, cannot treat the fact that the psychologist cannot account for them, as a convincing proof of such an origin, apart from our judgement upon the contents of what claims to be a revelation. Untrue thoughts and wicked thoughts sometimes arise equally unaccountably: the fact that they do so is even now accounted for by some as a sufficient proof of direct diabolic suggestion. When we have judged the {148} thought to be true or the suggestion to be good, then we, who on other grounds believe in God, may see in it a piece of divine revelation, but not till then.

From this point of view it is clear that we are able to recognize various degrees and various kinds of divine revelation in many different Religions, philosophies, systems of ethical teaching. We are able to recognize the importance to the world of the great historical Religions, in all of which we can acknowledge a measure of Revelation. The fact that the truths which they teach (in so far as they are true) can now be recognized as true by philosophic thought, does not show that the world would ever have evolved those thoughts, apart from the influence of the great revealing personalities. Philosophy itself—the Philosophy of the professed philosophers—has no doubt contributed a very important element to the content of the historical Religions; but it is only in proportion as they become part of a system of religious teaching, and the possession of an organized religious community, that the ideas of the philosophers really come home to multitudes of men, and shape the history of the world. Nor in many cases would the philosophers themselves have seen what they have seen but for the great epoch-making thoughts of the great religion-making periods. And the same considerations which show the importance of religious movements in the {149} past tend also to emphasize the importance of the historical Religion and of the religious community in which it is enshrined in modern times. Because religious truth can now be defended by the use of our ordinary intellectual faculties, and because all possess these faculties in some degree, it is absurd to suppose that the ordinary individual, if left to himself, would be likely to evolve a true religious system for himself—any more than he would be likely to discern for himself the truths that were first seen by Euclid or Newton if he were not taught them. To under-estimate the importance of the great historical Religions and their creators has been the besetting sin of technical religious Philosophy. Metaphysicians have in truth often written about Religion in great ignorance as to the real facts of religious history.

But because we recognize a measure of truth in all the historical Religions, it does not follow that we can recognize an equal amount of truth in all of them. The idea that all the Religions teach much the same thing—or that, while they vary about that unimportant part of Religion which is called doctrine or dogma, they are all agreed about Morality—is an idea which could only occur to the self-complaisant ignorance which of late years has done most of the theological writing in the correspondence columns of our newspapers. The real student of comparative {150} Religion knows that it is only at a rather advanced stage in the development of Religion that Religion becomes in any important degree an ethical teacher at all. Even the highest and most ethical Religions are not agreed either in their Ethics or in their Theology. Not only can we recognize higher and lower Religions; but the highest Religions, among many things which they have in common, are at certain points diametrically antagonistic to each other. It is impossible therefore reasonably to maintain that fashionable attitude of mind towards these Religions which my friend Professor Inge once described as a sort of honorary membership of all Religions except one's own. If we are to regard the historical Religions as being of any importance to our own personal religious life, we must choose between them. If we put aside the case of Judaism in its most cultivated modern form, a form in which it has been largely influenced by Christianity, I suppose there is practically only one Religion which would be in the least likely to appeal to a modern philosophical student of Religion as a possible alternative to Christianity—and that is Buddhism. But Buddhist Ethics are not the same as Christian Ethics. Buddhist Ethics are ascetic: the Christianity which Christ taught was anti-ascetic. In its view of the future, Buddhism is pessimistic; Christianity is optimistic. Much as {151} Buddhism has done to inculcate Humanity and Charity, the principle of Buddhist Humanity is not the same as that of Christianity. Humanity is encouraged by the Buddhist (in so far as he is really influenced by his own formal creed) not from a motive of disinterested affection, but as a means of escaping from the evils of personal and individual existence, and so winning Nirvana. We cannot at one and the same time adhere to the Ethics of Buddhism and to those of Christianity, though I am far from saying that Christians have nothing to learn either from Buddhist teaching or from Buddhist practice. Still less can we at one and the same time be Atheists with the Buddhist and Theists with the Christian; look forward with the Buddhist to the extinction of personal consciousness and with the Christian to a fuller and more satisfying life. To take an interest in comparative Religion is not to be religious; to be religious implies a certain exclusive attachment to some definite form of religious belief, though it may of course often be a belief to which many historical influences have contributed.

I have been trying to lead you to a view of Revelation which recognizes the existence and the importance of those exceptional religious minds to whom is due the foundation and development of the great historical Religions, while at the same time we refuse, in the last resort, to recognize any {152} revelation as true except on the ground that its truth can be independently verified. I do not mean to deny that the individual must at first, and may quite reasonably in some cases throughout life, accept much of his religious belief on authority; but that is only because he may be justified in thinking that such and such a person, or more probably such and such a religious community, is more likely to be right than himself. Rational submission to authority in this or that individual postulates independent judgement on the part of others. I am far from saying that every individual is bound to satisfy himself by personal enquiry as to the truth of every element in his own Religion; but, if and so far as he determines to do so, he cannot reasonably accept an alleged revelation on any other ground than that it comes home to him, that the content of that Religion appeals to him as true, as satisfying the demands of his intellect and of his conscience. The question in which most of us, I imagine, are most vitally interested is whether the Christian Religion is a Religion which we can accept on these grounds. That it possesses some truth, that whatever in it is true comes from God—that much is likely to be admitted by all who believe in any kind of Religion in the sense in which we have been discussing Religion. The great question for us is, 'Can we find any reason for the modern man {153} identifying himself in any exclusive way with the historical Christian Religion? Granted that there is some truth in all Religions, does Christianity contain the most truth? Is it in any sense the one absolute, final, universal Religion?'

That will be the subject for our consideration in the next lecture. But meanwhile I want to suggest to you one very broad provisional answer to our problem. Christianity alone of the historical Religions teaches those great truths to which we have been conducted by a mere appeal to Reason and to Conscience. It teaches ethical Monotheism; that is to say, it thinks of God as a thinking, feeling, willing Consciousness, and understands His nature in the light of the highest moral ideal. It teaches the belief in personal Immortality, and it teaches a Morality which in its broad general principles still appeals to the Conscience of Humanity. Universal Love it sets forth as at once the central point in its moral ideal and the most important element in its conception of God. In one of those metaphors which express so much more than any more exact philosophical formula, it is the Religion which teaches the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. And these truths were taught by the historical Jesus. No one up to his time had ever taught them with equal clearness and in equal purity, and with the same freedom from other and inconsistent teachings: {154} and this teaching was developed by his first followers. Amid all aberrations and amid all contamination by heterogeneous elements, the society or societies which look back to Christ as their Founder have never in the worst times ceased altogether to teach these truths; and now they more and more tend to constitute the essence of Christianity as it is to-day—all the more so on account of the Church's gradual shuffling off of so many adventitious ideas and practices which were at one time associated with them. Christianity is and remains the only one of the great historical Religions which has taught and does teach these great truths in all their fullness.[2] These considerations would by themselves be sufficient to put Christianity in an absolutely unique position among the Religions of Mankind.

I have so far been regarding our Lord Jesus Christ simply as a teacher of religious and ethical truth. I think it is of fundamental importance that we should begin by regarding him in this light. {155} It was in this light that he first presented himself to his fellow-countrymen—even before (in all probability) he claimed to be the fulfiller of the Messianic ideal which had been set before them by the prophets of their race. And I could not, without a vast array of quotation, give you a sufficient impression of the prominence of this aspect of his work and personality among the earlier Greek Fathers. Even after the elaborate doctrines of Catholic Christianity had begun to be developed, it was still primarily as the supremely inspired Teacher that Jesus was most often thought of. When the early Christians thought of him as the incarnate Logos or Reason of God, to teach men divine truth was still looked upon as the supreme function of the Logos and the purpose of his indwelling in the historical Jesus. But from the first Jesus appealed to men as much more than a teacher. It is one of the distinctive peculiarities of religious and ethical knowledge that it is intimately connected with character: religious and moral teaching of the highest kind is in a peculiar degree inseparable from the personality of the teacher. Jesus impressed his contemporaries, and he has impressed successive ages as having not only set before man the highest religious and moral ideal, but as having in a unique manner realized that ideal in his own life. Even the word 'example' {156} does not fully express the impression which he made on his followers, or do justice to the inseparability of his personality from his teaching. In the religious consciousness of Christ men saw realized the ideal relation of man not merely to his fellow-man but also to his heavenly Father. From the first an enthusiastic reverence for its Founder has been an essential part of the Christian Religion amid all the variety of the phases which it has assumed. The doctrine of the Christian Church was in its origin an attempt to express in the philosophical language of the time its sense of this supreme value of Christ for the religious and moral life of man. As to the historical success and the present usefulness of these attempts, I shall have a word to say next time. Meanwhile, I would leave with you this one thought. The claim of Christianity to be the supreme, the universal, in a sense the final Religion, must rest mainly, in the last resort, upon the appeal which Christ and his Religion make to the moral and religious consciousness of the present.