One step more. Let us follow this historical incarnation of religious tradition into its most material form. The inner experiences of men of God and the witness of them that they give to the world, express themselves naturally in speech, and this in its turn is transformed into Scripture. It is in this way that in all civilised religions divine revelation is presented to man in the form of a sacred writing; everywhere it is gathered into collections of sacred books which have been called the bibles of humanity. While all these have been born according to the same psychological and historical laws, it does not follow that they have all the same value, or that an unintelligent syncretism has the right to mix together the various elements in them to make of them one common and characterless Bible. No; each of them naturally belongs to a particular stage in the ladder of divine revelations, and there we must leave them. The highest will always be that which contains the deepest and purest expression of inward religion, and consequently offers to man the most precious treasure. The rank of the Hebrew and Christian Bible is thus found to be logically determined by the moral worth of the Hebrew and the Christian religions. But in leaving historical criticism and religious experience to make here the necessary demonstration and render it daily more evident, we must once more call to mind the always human conditions of these written collections, of those at the top as well as those at the bottom of the ladder, conditions which forbid us ever to identify the letter and the spirit, the divine inspiration and the particular form in which it has been clothed.
God, wishing to speak to us, has never chosen any but human organs. With whatever inspiration He has endowed them, that inspiration has always therefore passed through human subjectivity; it has only been able either to express or to translate itself in the language and the turn of mind of a particular individual and of a particular time. Now, no individual and historical form can be absolute. If the contents are divine, the vessel is always earthen. The organ of the revelation of God necessarily limits it. It must of necessity accommodate itself to the limits of human receptivity. How could it possibly enter and mingle with the changing waves of the intellectual and moral life of humanity unless it flowed in the bed of the river and between its banks?
However incontestable this historical complexity of the divine and human elements in religion, most men seem incapable of comprehending it, and of frankly accepting it. Men of little faith, we feel ourselves lost the moment men take from us the illusion that we ever have before us and outside of us the divine revelation in an objective and unadulterated form, when alongside authority and tradition they make a place for the freedom and the interpretation of consciousness. Is there then some chemistry by which we can separate that which God has joined so indissolubly? Has life ever been seen apart from living beings or light apart from luminous vibrations? Why not make an effort to see that the wisdom of God is infinitely greater than our own, and that what He has given us is better than that of which we dreamed. Life and light, even if they are not absolute, propagate themselves with none the less force.
Lastly, what is the criterion by which you may recognise an authentic revelation of God in the books you read, in the things you are taught? Listen: only one criterion is sufficient and infallible: every divine revelation, every religious experience fit to nourish and sustain your soul, must be able to repeat and continue itself as an actual revelation and an individual experience in your own consciousness. What cannot enter thus as a permanent and constituent element into the woof of your inner life, to enrich, enfranchise, and transform it into a higher life, cannot be for you a light, or, consequently, a divine revelation. The spirit of life is not there. Do not believe that the prophets and founders have transmitted to you their experience in order to make yours needless, or that their revelation has been brought to you in a book for you to receive passively and as if it were an alien thing. Religious truth cannot be borrowed like money, or, rather, if you do so borrow it you are none the richer. Remember what the Samaritans said to the woman: "Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world" (John iv. 42). Thus the divine revelation which is not realised in us, and does not become immediate, does not exist for us. And I admire the counsel of God, Who, wishing to raise man into liberty, did not give to him an objective revelation which would have become to him a yoke of bondage. The aim of tradition is liberty, and liberty returns lovingly to tradition when, instead of finding it a yoke, it sees in it only a help, an aliment, a guide.
5. Conclusion
Such, in its principle, and with all its consequences, is the new idea of revelation given to us by psychology and history. Before it vanish the insoluble antitheses and conflicts raised by scholasticism between supernatural and natural revelation, between what the theologians call immediate and mediate, between a universal and a special revelation. Synthesis is made, and peace is re-established.
There is not and could never have been two revelations different in nature and opposed to each other. Revelation is one, in different forms and various degrees. It is at once supernatural and natural: supernatural by the cause which engenders it in souls, and which, always remaining invisible and transcendent, never exhausts or imprisons itself in the phenomena it produces; natural, by its effects, because, realising itself in history, it always appears therein conditioned by the historical environment and by the common laws which regulate the human mind.
This revelation also is immediate for all, for the least in the kingdom of heaven, as for the greatest of the prophets; for God desires to admit them all into direct and personal communion with Himself; and it is equally mediate for all; for it comes to none, whether prophets or their disciples, unconditionally, and without previous preparation.
Lastly, it is not less false and futile to oppose universal revelation to particular revelations as two exclusive quantities. Particular revelations enter into general revelation as varieties into species. Every special revelation, if it be really from God, is human, and tends to become universal; every general revelation was once individual, for it could only have been made in an individuality. Among the men and peoples chosen by God as organs there is inequality in gifts but solidarity in the common work. We must not mistake the one or the other. The religious vocation of humanity does not exclude—it prepares and supports—the particular vocation of Israel. In this national vocation there is a place for that of the prophets, and, among the prophets, for the vocation of Him who was their heir, and in Whom the revelation of God was completed, because in His consciousness was realised perfectly the very idea of piety.
Is everything explained in religion, then, and nothing left obscure? Far from that! There remains the ground from which emerges the conscious and moral life of the soul; there remains that initial mystery, the relation in our consciousness between the individual and the universal element, between the finite and the infinite, between God and man. How can we comprehend their co-existence and their union, and yet how can we doubt it? Where is the thoughtful man to-day who has not broken the thin crust of his daily life, and caught a glimpse of those profound and obscure waters on which floats our consciousness? Who has not felt within himself a veiled presence and a force much greater than his own? What worker in a lofty cause has not perceived within his own personal activity, and saluted with a feeling of veneration, the mysterious activity of a universal and eternal power? In Deo vivimus, movemur et sumus. There is perhaps no other mystery in religion; at all events all others are but particular forms of this. But this mystery cannot be dissipated, for, without it, religion itself would no longer exist.