While, therefore, in this, if anywhere, we perceive the only at once fit and definite answer to prayer, and find that this is acknowledged by all faiths, from the savage to the Christian, it would seem that this answer is a fallacious and futile one. The teachings of inspiration are infinitely discrepant and contradictory, and often plainly world-wide from the truth they pretend to embody. The case seems hopeless; yet, as religion of any kind without prayer is empty, there has been a proper unwillingness to adopt the conclusion just stated.
The distinction has been made that “the inspiration of the Christian is altogether subjective, and directed to the moral improvement of the individual,”[140-2] not to facts of history or questions of science, even exegetic science. The term illumination has been preferred for it, and while it is still defined as “a spiritual intelligence which brings truth within the range of mental apprehension by a kind of intuition,”[141-1] this truth has reference only to immediate matters of individual faith and practice. The Roman church allows more latitude than this, as it sanctions revelations concerning events, but not concerning doctrines.[141-2]
Looked at narrowly, the advantage which inspiration has been to religions has not so much depended on what it taught, as on its strength as a psychological motive power. As a general mental phenomenon it does not so much concern knowledge as belief; its province is to teach faith rather than facts. No conviction can equal that which arises from an assertion of God directly to ourselves. The force of the argument lies not in the question whether he did address us, but whether we believe he did. As a stimulus to action, prayer thus rises to a prime power.
Belief is considered by Professor Bain and his school to be the ultimate postulate, the final ground of intellection. It is of the utmost importance, however,—and this Professor Bain fails to do—to distinguish between two kinds of belief. There are men who believe and others who disbelieve the Koran or the Bible; I can accept or reject the historical existence of King Arthur or Napoleon; but, if I understand them, I cannot disbelieve the demonstrations of Euclid, nor the relations of subject and object, nor the formal laws of thought. No sane man, acquainted with the properties of numbers, can believe that twice three are ten, or that a thing can be thought as other than itself. These truths that “we cannot help believing,” I have defined in the first chapter as absolute truths. They do not come to us through testimony and induction, but through a process variously called “immediate perception,” “apprehension,” or “intuition,” a process long known but never satisfactorily explained.
All such truths are analytic, that is, they are true, not merely for a given time or place, but at all times and places conceivable, or, time and space out of the question, they still remain formally true. Of course, therefore, they cannot refer to historic occurrences nor phenomena. The modern position, that truth lies in facts, must be forsaken, and with the ancients, we must place it in ideas.
If we define inspiration as that condition of mind which is in the highest degree sensitive to the presence of such truth, we have of it the only worthy idea which it is possible to frame. The object of scientific investigation is to reach a truth which can neither be denied nor doubted. If religion is willing to content itself with any lower form of truth, it cannot support its claims to respect, let alone reverence.
It may be said that the subjects with which the religious sentiment concerns itself are not such as are capable of this absolute expression. This is, however, disclaimed by all great reformers, and by none more emphatically than by him who said: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my statements (λογοι) shall not pass away.” There is clear reference here to absolute truths. If what we know of God, duty and life, is not capable of expression except in historic narrative and synthetic terms, the sooner we drop their consideration the better. That form sufficed for a time, but can no longer, when a higher is generally known. As the mathematical surpasses the historic truth, so the former is in turn transcended by the purely logical, and in this, if anywhere, religion must rest its claims for recognition. Here is the arena of the theology of the future, not in the decrees of councils, nor in the records of past time.
Inspiration, in its religious sense, we may, therefore, define to be that condition of mind in which the truths relating to deity and duty become in whole or in part the subjects of immediate perception.
That such a condition is possible will be granted. Every reformer who has made a permanent betterment in the religion of his time has possessed it in some degree. He who first conceived the Kosmos under logical unity as an orderly whole, had it in singular power; so too had he who looking into the mind became aware of its purposive laws which are the everlasting warrants of duty. Some nations have possessed it in remarkable fulness, none more so than the descendants of Abraham, from himself, who left his kindred and his father’s house at the word of God, through many eminent seers down to Spinoza, who likewise forsook his tribe to obey the inspirations vouchsafed him; surpassing them all, Jesus of Nazareth, to whose mind, as he waxed in wisdom, the truth unfolded itself in such surpassing clearness that neither his immediate disciples nor any generations since have fathomed all the significance of his words.
Such minds do not need development and organic transmission of thought to enrich their stores. We may suppose the organization of their brains to be so perfect that their functions are always accordant with true reasoning, so self-prompting, that a hint of the problem is all they ask to arrive at its demonstration. Blaise Pascal, when a boy of twelve, whose education had been carefully restrained, once asked his father what is geometry. The latter replied that it is a method devised to draw figures correctly, but forbade any further inquiry about it. On this hint Pascal, by himself, unassisted, without so much as knowing the name of a line or circle, reached in a few weeks to the demonstration of the thirty-second problem of the first book of Euclid! Is it not possible for a mind equally productive of religious truth to surpass with no less ease its age on such subjects?