IV
I can best undertake my brief initial study of the way in which the experience of the individual human being is a source of religious insight by meeting an objection that a reading of my printed programme may have aroused in the minds of some of you. My list of the sources of religious insight, as contained in the titles of these lectures, makes no express reference to a source which some of you will be disposed to regard as the principal source, namely, Revelation. Here, some of you will already have said, is a very grave omission. Man's principal insight into the need and the way of salvation comes, and must come, you will say, from without, from the revelation that the divine power which saves, makes of itself, through Scripture or through the Church. Now, so far as this thesis forms part of the doctrine of a particular religion, namely, in your own case, of Christianity, I shall in these lectures omit any direct discussion of that thesis. The reason for the omission I have already pointed out. These lectures undertake a limited task, and must be judged by their chosen limitations. But in so far as revelation is a general term, meaning whatever intercourse there may be between the divine and the human, all these lectures, in dealing with sources of religious insight, will be dealing with processes of revelation. And in what sense this [{20}] assertion is true we shall see as we go on with our undertaking. This first mention of revelation enables me, however, both to state and to answer the objection to my programme which I have just mentioned, and in doing so to vindicate for the experience of any religiously disposed individual its true significance as a source of insight. Hereby, as I hope, I can forthwith show that even the present deliberately limited undertaking of these lectures has an importance which you ought to recognise, whatever your own views about revelation may be.
Let me suppose, then, that an objector, speaking on behalf of revelation as the main source of religious insight, states his case briefly thus: "Man learns of his need for salvation chiefly through learning what God's will is, and through a consequent discovery that his own natural will is not in conformity with God's will. He learns about the way of salvation by finding out by what process God is willing to save him. Both sorts of knowledge must be principally mediated through God's revelation of himself, of his will, and of his plan of salvation. For, left to himself, man cannot find out these things. Apart from revelation, they are divine secrets. Hence the principal source of religious insight must be revelation."
Whoever states his case thus brings to our attention at this point what I may venture to name: The Religious Paradox, or, to use other terms. The Paradox of Revelation. I call attention to this [{21}] paradox in no spirit of mere cavilling or quibbling. The importance of the matter the whole course of these lectures will show. The religious paradox, as we shall define it, is one of the deepest facts in all religious history and experience. It will meet us everywhere; and every devout soul daily faces it. Moreover, as we shall see, it is a special case of a paradox regarding our human insight which is as universal and pervasive, in its significance for us, as is our human intelligence itself. I call it here the religious paradox. I shall later show you that it might be called, just as correctly, the paradox of common-sense, the paradox of reason, the paradox of knowledge, yes, the paradox of being thoughtfully alive in any sense whatever.
The religious paradox, viewed as it first comes to us, may be stated thus: Let a man say: "I have this or this religious insight because God has revealed to me, thus and thus, his will about me and his plans; has taught me my need of salvation and the divine way of salvation.
"'Man is blind because of sin;
Revelation makes him sure;
Without that who looks within,
Looks in vain; for all's obscure.'"
Let a man say this. At once, addressing this believer in a revelation, we must ask, in no jesting spirit, but with the fullest sense of the tragic gravity of the issue: "By what marks do you personally [{22}] distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?"
Consider for an instant what this question implies. A depositor at a bank, in signing a cheque, reveals to his bank his will that such and such funds, which he already has on deposit at the bank, shall be paid to the order of a certain person. How is the bank able to recognise this revelation of the depositor's will? The answer is: The bank, acting in the usual order of business, regards this revelation as genuine because its officers already know, with sufficient assurance, the depositor's signature, and can therefore recognise it at sight, subject, of course, to a certain usually negligible risk of forgery. Apply the principle here involved to the case of the one who acknowledges the genuineness of a divine revelation. In asserting: "I know that this revelation is from God," the believer in the revelation asserts, in substance, that in some sense and by some means he personally knows, as it were, the divine signature; knows by what marks the divine being reveals himself. This is the vast presumption, if you will, upon which the believer in revelation depends for his assurance. He knows God's autograph. Now, how shall such a knowledge of the divine autograph have arisen in the mind of the individual believer? Has this believer first wandered through all the worlds to learn how the various orders of beings express themselves, what marks of their wisdom and of their interest in humanity [{23}] they show, and who amongst them are, or who alone is, actually divine?
I repeat--the stupendous question thus suggested is one which I mention not in any spirit of cavil, but solely for the sake of directing us on our further way, and of calling attention at the outset to a fact upon which all that is most vital in the religious consciousness has in every age depended. Every acceptance of a revelation, I say, depends upon something that, in the individual's mind, must be prior to this acceptance. And this something is an assurance that the believer already knows the essential marks by which a divine revelation is to be distinguished from any other sort of report. In other words, a revelation can be viewed by you as a divine revelation only in case you hold, for whatever reason, or for no reason, that you already are acquainted with the signature which the divine will attaches to its documents, that you know the marks of any authentic revelation by which a divine will can make itself known to you. Unless, then, you are to make one supposed revelation depend for its warrant upon another in an endless series, you must presuppose that somewhere there is found a revelation that proves its genuineness by appealing to what your own interior light, your personal acquaintance with the nature of a divine being, enables you to know as the basis of all your further insight into the divine. The one who appeals to revelation for guidance cannot then escape from basing his appeal [{24}] upon something which involves a personal and individual experience of what the need and the way of salvation is and of what the divine nature and expression essentially involves.
Nor is this remark merely the unsympathetic comment of a philosophical critic of what passes for revelation. The truth of the remark is acknowledged by all those who have in one way or another insisted that, without the witness of the spirit in the heart, no external revelation could enlighten those who are in darkness; that miracles by themselves are inadequate, because signs and wonders cannot teach the divine will to those whom grace, working inwardly, does not prepare for enlightenment; and that, in brief, if there is any religious insight whatever accessible, it cannot come to us without our individual experience as its personal foundation.
Now, the religious paradox is this: What one pretends or at least hopes to know, when there is any question of religious insight, is something which has to do with the whole nature and destiny and duty and fate of man. For just such matters are in question when we talk, not of how to earn our living or of how to get this or that worldly prosperity, but about our need of salvation and about how to be saved. So deep and so weighty are these matters, that to pretend to know about them seems to involve knowing about the whole nature of things. And when we conceive of the whole nature [{25}] of things as somehow interested in us and in our salvation, as the religiously minded very generally do, we call this nature of things divine, in a very familiar sense of that word. Hence the higher religions generally undertake to know, as they say, the divine. And by the divine they mean some real power or principle or being that saves us or that may save us. But how is this divine to be known? By revelation? But knowledge through revelation can enlighten only the one in whose personal experience there is somewhere an adequate interior light, which shines in the darkness, and which permits him to test all revelations by a prior acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of the divine will. Hereupon arises the question: How should I, weak of wit as I am, ignorant, fallible, a creature of a day, come to possess that intimate acquaintance with the plan of all things, and with the meaning of life, and with the divine, which I must obtain in case I am to pass upon the marks whereby any revelation that can save me is to be tested? The paradox is that a being who is so ignorant of his duty and of his destiny as to need guidance at every point, so weak as to need saving, should still hope, in his fallible experience, to get into touch with anything divine. The question is, how is this possible? What light can my individual experience throw upon vast problems such as this?