| LECTURE VI. RELIGION IN THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD | Title page | LECTURE VIII. JESUS CHRIST THE DIVINE AND HUMAN PERSON |
[ p. 166 ]
WHEN we pass from the more or less conjectural reconstruction of primitive religion to the great historic creeds, we are at once on more accessible and more familiar ground. From the moment of their entry upon our horizon, the historic nations of the world are in possession of definite religions, which, though distinguished by many local and racial peculiarities, contain much that is common property, both in modes of thought and ways of worship. These religions have had to encounter various disintegrating forces, patronage, persecution, popular degradation and distortion, schismatic disruption, infidel attack. Yet however modified, they have persisted with a tenacious vitality, that abundantly proves how natural religion is toman. He cannot get rid of it, do what he will.
Now we have already seen the apologetic value of this universality of religion, as creating a presumption of its truth. But that apologetic value [ p. 167 ] would be seriously impaired if we did not believe that all religion had its divine counterpart or element of inspiration from on high. Consequently there can be no greater mistake—from an apologetic point of view—than to depreciate the ethnic religions in the supposed interests of an exclusive revelation. For if it were granted that the majority of the religions in the world had existed unsustained by any kind of inspiration, this would constitute a strong presumption that the remainder were in similar case. The world’s religion is too much of a piece to be torn asunder in this way. There is too obvious a solidarity about it. Its higher stages are inseparably joined with the lower steps that have led up to them; and if we held that the mass of mankind had been deceived in supposing themselves capable of intercourse with the spiritual world, we should have no logical right to make a particular exception. Of course this implies the existence of degrees of inspiration or revelation ; but that is neither a new thought, nor one likely to be denied in an age whose characteristic category is development. It was the absence of the notion of development, and therefore of degrees of inspiration which involved the Gnostics in all their difficulties about the Old Testament. For conceiving that the morality of all its characters, and the obvious anthropomorphism of its language were to be judged by the highest [ p. 168 ] Christian standard, they had no alternative but to reject the Old Testament altogether. Origen saw in what direction the true answer to this must lie, though he did not dwell on it at length. But for us the notion of a relative and gradual revelation to the Hebrew race has become a commonplace. And it is natural that the same principle should extend to all other religions. We have already seen, within the limits of the individual life, how gradual the process of God’s self-revelation is, and how dependent upon character and conduct, even when what may be called its external instruments lie ready to hand, in the shape of a theology and ethic refined by the highest religious tradition. Consequently we should still more expect this to be the case, under the less favourable circumstances of a time, when divine personality could not be conceived except in terms of polytheism, nor divine omnipresence except in terms of pantheism, nor divine holiness except in terms of dualism, or in the earlier ages for which even such terms as these were too advanced. And what is true of the individual must be equally true of the individual ‘writ large’ in the family, the class, the tribe, the nation, the race.
We expect, then, a priori, that wherever there is religion there will be notes of inspiration or revelation about it; but we are very far from expecting that these notes will be invariably clear. [ p. 169 ] And on turning to religious history this is what seems to be the case. The picture is a confused one, and patient of various interpretations, while every increase in our knowledge of its details makes generalization less secure; each path ends as we pursue it, each clue fails as we follow it up. There is evidence enough on all sides of man seeking God, if haply he might find Him, but far less of God finding or being found of man. Still superficial views of history are seldom accurate, especially where the things of the spirit are concerned. Isolated events should no more be expected to reveal God than isolated atoms, abstract history than abstract matter. And in the present case there will be found much which, on reflection, tends to qualify our initial disappointment.
To begin with, there is the actual hold of religion upon man, its grasp of him. We have already considered this in relation to uncivilized races, but it is noless evident elsewhere. The ritual regulations of India, Persia, Babylon, Egypt, speak for themselves. They are obviously human enough ; minute, excessive, often puerile. Yet there is something behind them ; they labour to formulate something other than themselves, a power, an order, an authority, of which man is vaguely but really conscious, and which he craves to have translated into words that he can understand. We turn with impatience from the endless pages [ p. 170 ] of the religious law-books of the world; but their very mass is an indication of the divine superintendence which they symbolize; an effort to express the sense of infinite obligation, by the accumulation of infinitesimal rules.
Again, there is what may be called the internal evidence of the world’s religious literature, the intellectual illumination, the high moral precepts, the flashes of spiritual insight which it contains. The proportion of these things has been often exaggerated by detachment of them from their context, their common-place, wearisome, even offensive context. They are rare gems in an earthy matrix; dust of gold in a base alloy. But still there they are. The fact of them remains, and must be taken into account. By themselves, indeed, they would hardly convey the inspiration of their utterers or authors to a mind otherwise indisposed to believe it, and might easily be attributed to what is commonly called unassisted or natural reason. But they are parts of a whole, and help to link the lower and more human seeming creeds, to those of whose divine origination there is other and stronger proof; thus emphasizing the ultimate unity of religion, as well as its universality, and suggesting the presence in its earlier phases of the same Spirit that has guided its mature results.
Then, again, there is the extensive belief in one [ p. 171 ] kind or another of divine intercourse with man. From the savage who is not yet consciously separated from his crudely conceived divinities, to the saint who is in conscious reunion with a holy God, man has taken his religious relationships as facts. That is to say, he has not only regarded ’ himself as related to God, but God, in one way or another, as related to himself, and this has naturally led to the recognition of inspiration or revelation. Its organs have been various. Now the king, now the sage, now the bard, the ascetic, the prophet, or the priest, has been viewed as the favourite recipient of communications from on high; but the fact of the communications has remained undoubted, and has powerfully influenced life. Of course it is easy enough to set such things aside as hallucinations, the older theory of imposture being somewhat out of date. But as our knowledge of their power and prevalence increases, this can hardly be done without involving our whole ‘rational make and constitution’ in the same suspicion—a reductio ad absurdum, which will give most men pause. While for all who do not deny its possibility in this arbitrary way, the existence of the belief in question is a fact of weight; for it would hardly have maintained its hold upon our race throughout the ages, unless verified in ways and degrees that we can better guess than gauge. For it is the old, we must remember, and not the young, who transmit the [ p. 172 ] traditions of religion; those, that is, who have acquired assurance by the inner experience of a lifetime, and can add the comment of their own conviction to the text. And the value of this conviction cannot possibly be tested by the mere amount of evidence now producible to us; the slender basis on which, as seen down the long historical perspective, it appears to us to rest. For it is in the colour and complexion of that evidence to contemporary eyes, its spiritual complement in the hearts and consciences of those to whom it first appealed that all its real cogency consists. And with this in mind, we may fairly assert that the antiquity, the persistence, the continuous transmission of man’s belief in some sort of revelation, inspiration, or other intercourse with God is a powerful corroboration of its truth[1].
Thus the picture of the world’s religion as a whole impresses us with a conviction which it is difficult to analyze, but difficult also to resist. Infinite ingenuity has been expended in explaining it away, but with infinitesimal result. It is so universal, its fundamental principles so similar, its hold upon human life so strong, its influence upon human history so incalculably great, that we cannot believe there is nothing real behind it, and the alternative to nothing is God; God working far more deliberately, far more obscurely, than we [ p. 173 ] might have expected, yet indicating perhaps by that very fact that He is God.
This much at least might be said if the ethnic religions stood alone; but they do not stand alone. There is the Hebrew religion. The Hebrew Scriptures are a part of the religious literature of the world, and are linked and connected with the remainder of that literature by countless analogies of thought and form. Whatever further light, therefore, the Old Testament throws upon religion, must be used in the interpretation of all inferior forms of belief; while they in turn, as, in that light, their drift and meaning gather clearness, illustrate the development of the creed which is their crown, and in so doing assist the argument—the cumulative argument—for the common element of truth which they contain. In saying this, one is taking for granted, what no competent student is ever likely to deny; that our increased acquaintance with the religious literature of the ancient world has emphasized the supremacy of the Old Testament Scriptures. They still stand in lonely eminence, as they have always stood, immeasurably superior to all else of their kind.
Now of the two elements which may be broadly distinguished in the Old Testament, the prophetic and the priestly, it is the former which gives its peculiar, its unique character, to the book. The priestly element closely resembles much that we [ p. 174 ] meet elsewhere; but the prophetic at once differentiates Hebrew religion, and Hebrew history from that of the remainder of the world, and has always constituted one of the strongest special arguments for belief in a personal God.
Hebrew prophecy has two aspects, its ultimate and its contemporary aspect. Its ultimate aspect, when viewed as a whole, is that of a preparation for the Incarnation. As such it had immense weight in the earlier days of Christianity, and is of immense weight still. For though the modern tendency is to limit the vision of the individual prophets, every step in this direction of necessity increases our conviction of their providential superintendence. But this aspect of Hebrew prophecy only affects our present subject indirectly, through its connexion with Christian belief. It is otherwise with its contemporary aspect. That has an immediate bearing on divine personality, as presenting us with direct evidence of divine inspiration. Here, too, in modern days, we have somewhat changed our point of view; but in a constructive, not a destructive, direction. The change in fact resembles, and strictly speaking is a part of, our changed attitude towards the argument from final causes or design in nature, of which design in history is at once the corollary and crown.
The character of this change has been already pointed out. There was a tendency, when design [ p. 175 ] was first observed in nature, to regard every object in the world as having a definite final cause; a particular purpose or function which it was destined to subserve; an end outside itself. This was what is called a mechanical teleology, or teleology which viewed the world as a machine. It was inadequate, and like all inadequate conceptions partly false; but at the same time it was an inevitable stage in the development of our modern organic teleology.
We now recognize that a fuller and more complete view of nature is to be obtained, by looking at things as in the first instance ends in themselves, organisms destined to exist and to preserve and perpetuate their own existence; and, incidentally, as it were, in so doing to fulfil other and ‘further purposes ‘in that eternal circle life pursues.’
Now the argument from prophecy was at one time presented as an argument from design of the narrower sort. The prophets were regarded as specially inspired to-predict future events. The prediction of the future was in fact their final cause, and the fulfilment of the prediction, the proof of their inspiration. But the progress of criticism has modified this view, by showing how many political and social predictions of the prophets were never in any literal sense fulfilled at all; and has further called attention to the fact, that the recorded fulfilment of a prediction in the past depends for its value upon the date of the record, and as long [ p. 176 ] as that is an open, or doubtful question, cannot reasonably be used in controversial argument.
This criticism has led us to look closer at the prophets, and resulted in a deeper insight into their character and work. We now recognize that the primary mission of a prophet is to his age. He is a preacher of righteousness to the men of his day. His sufficient reason is there and then. But righteousness may be preached in many ways. And the Hebrew prophets are distinguished by their conviction that righteousness is the will of an omnipotent Person, the Creator of the material as well as of the moral universe; consequently that sooner or later, it must work itself out in the material world, it must make the material world its own, it must triumph visibly.
Thus their insight into the moral law enabled them to predict, as the insight into physical law enables a man of science to predict. Such prophecy: must be distinguished from the minute and detailed prediction of historic times, and seasons, and persons and events. With the latter, and the countless controversies in .which it is involved, our present inquiry has no concern. If universally true, such predictions cannot be logically verified, and therefore would not assist our argument. If frequently false they would only illustrate the human fallibility of the prophets, which we do not for a moment deny, and in so doing would [ p. 177 ] emphasize the superhuman origin of their central _ thought—the inevitable triumph of divine righteousness in the world. This is their eternal prophecy; and however distant its complete realization, every age has seen it partially fulfilled. Thus, in speaking to their own, the prophets spoke to other ages. Primarily they preached ; incidentally they prophesied ;- because they proclaimed a law which operates in ever-widening circles. And .though the fulfilment of prediction, thus understood, may seem to many minds less evidential than the apposite occurrence of a name or date would be, it carries with it a more profound conviction that we have reached the spiritual heart of things, and are in presence of the Power that moves the world. Nor is this view of prophecy so novel as is sometimes supposed. For, paradoxical as the statement may seem, it rests on the same principle as that mystical interpretation which has always had a place in the Christian Church. Mystical interpretation, as applied by its real masters, was no mere play of poetic fancy, no arbitrary reading into history or prophecy of a meaning which it did not contain. It rested upon the principle that all true spiritual utterances, or spiritually circumstanced events, are manifestations of a law which is eternal ; and may therefore be regarded as symbolic or descriptive of every subsequent operation of that law; while since history deepens as it develops, [ p. 178 ] deepens in complexity and scope, its later phases express more fully what its earlier did but indicate, and in this sense are the realities of which the latter were the types.
But though this method of interpretation is true in principle, its prevalence has tended to obscure the facts of history from many minds. The literal and the mystical fulfilment of prophecy have become confused. And absorbed in the thought of its spiritual realization, men have lost sight of its innumerable historic failures. The prophets have been regarded as infallible oracles, and thereby emptied of their true humanity. Whereas it is precisely in their true humanity that their significance consists. They were not only liable to faint and fail like other men, but also to err in their practical application of that spiritual truth which they possessed. They were akin to the religious leaders of all other races ; they were men and not machines. And it is their common humanity which throws their exceptional character into such relief. They are aseries of men, ‘ of like passions with ourselves, in whom the conviction of intercourse with God reached its climax and complete expression. As a result of this intercourse they proclaim the unity and holiness of God, in accents of unfaltering certitude, ‘Thus saith the Lord, is their continual cry. In other words, they believe themselves inspired. Further, they recognize their own inspiration, and [ p. 179 ] its necessary revelation to their people, as constituting a mission, a destiny, a call; first to separate themselves from other nations, and then to proclaim, to other nations, the truth which they alone possess. They thus progressively shape a people and compose a literature, penetrated by monotheism, and by the certainty of its ultimate triumph in the world; the latter thought, as we have seen, of necessity flowing from the former, as its inevitable consequence when consistently thought-out. Thus the prophets have a place of their own in the history of the world. Their existence and their immediate work are unaffected by critical controversies. They stand out among the greatest of our race. We have seen that the whole human race has tended to believe in personal gods, and in the possibility of intercourse with them; and that the higher degrees of that intercourse, by the common consent of every nation, have been attri. buted only to the few; while the few in divers degrees have professed its experience and transmitted its tradition. It is in the company of these few, though eminent above them, that the Hebrew prophets stand. And this must be borne in mind, in weighing their witness to our belief in God. However abnormal their experience, it was of a kind which the human race expected, and for which it everywhere and always looked. It has the instinct of all humanity behind it, and is strengthened [ p. 180 ] by that instinct, while it strengthens it in turn. ’ Now the prophets claim inspiration; they profess their conviction that God is personally speaking through them. They exhibit the natural human concomitants of such a condition. They shrink back, they are abashed, they despond, they fly, they agonize at the greatness of their fate. And yet when they speak, they speak with the serene authority of certitude. They are disinterested ; they have nothing to gain and all to lose by their vocation. They are sane; there is no morbid phrensy or fanatical excitement about them. They proclaim a truth which they are sure by its very nature must prevail. And in fact it has prevailed. This is their great, their world-wide, their undeniable fulfilment. And the significance of it cannot, for our purpose, be more decisively expressed than by quoting its most uncompromising critic. ‘ What,’ asks Professor Kuenen, ‘did the Israelitish prophets accomplish? What was the result of their work, and what value are we to assign to it?
Ethical monotheism is their creation. They have themselves ascended to the belief in one, only, holy, and righteous God, who realizes His will, or moral good, in the world, and they have, by preaching and writing, made that belief the inalienable property of our race[2].’
[ p. 181 ]
What then are we to think of the psychological phenomenon which these men present? An opponent who, in the face of all the other lines of evidence, still disbelieves in a personal God, may perhaps not find much additional difficulty in regarding the prophets as deluded; though by so doing he will be landed in the awkward position, to which we have already had occasion to refer, of. attributing a predominant factor. in human progress, and by implication human progress itself, to a delusion. But, on the other hand, if we approach the prophets with the opposite presumption, we cannot but feel that they confirm our belief. They claim inspiration; it isa claim which, as we have seen, the majority of mankind has never thought unnatural. They claim an experience which, if true, is by that very fact above and beyond the power of any other men to analyse. And in virtue of this claim they have accomplished in the world, precisely what they professed themselves commissioned to accomplish. The simplest hypothesis about them is that they spoke the truth, and are a crowning evidence of God’s personal intercourse with men.
But the significance of the prophets does not end here. The Old Testament, the prophetic book, remains ; and when we speak of its inspiration, we do not merely mean that it was once inspired, but that it is still inspired as a present, an ever [ p. 182 ] present fact, which admits of experimental verification to-day. As there is a vague apprehension. in many minds that modern criticism, in questioning our traditional views of the Bible, may invalidate its claim to inspiration, it is necessary that we should distinguish clearly between criticism and spiritual interpretation. Literary criticism—using the phrase in its most comprehensive sense ;— literary criticism is a science, and its object is to find out facts; as for example, when, where and by whom a book was written ; what precise words its author used, and what precise meaning he intended to convey. Its problems are complex; its methods subtle and somewhat subjective ; many of its conclusions, at present, tentative. But it is a perfectly legitimate science, with a profoundly important end in view; and ought no more to be discredited than any other science, by the fact that its various exponents are not all equally wise, nor always in mutualaccord. This science investigates the Bible, as it investigates the Avesta or the Vedas, and is as supreme within its province as it is impotent beyond. But inspiration is a phenomenon wholly and entirely beyond its province ; a spiritual voice which can only be heard by the Spiritual ear. The words and events of the Bible are its material medium of expression, its human organ of utterance ; but when none are listening, they resemble a silent instrument of music, which may be [ p. 183 ] handled, examined, criticized, classified, explained without thought of its latent power to. stir the soul. - Thus criticism and inspiration do not move in the same plane, and can never meet or interfere with one another, and the notion that they do so is due to a confusion of thought, from which the more polemical partisans of neither are quite free. In one case, indeed, this mistake may command our sympathy, though not our approval ; in the case of the really religious man, who has come to associate spiritual truth with the particular form of thought, or words, in which it has habitually come home to himself, and sensitively shrinks from any severance of the two, as from the disruption of his very soul. Yet, however natural, this is a weakness, and a weakness in whose conquest the essence of spiritual progress oftentimes consists. Meanwhile, the existence of such men is a cloke for the far larger and less earnest class, whose religion consists in holding fast the form of sound words without its substance; the religious materialists of all time, who, knowing nothing of the interior life of the spirit, imagine that in grasping its externals they grasp all; and are proportionably alarmed at the very notion of examining what, with only too sure an instinct, they call the grounds of their belief. These men in turn play into the hands of the open opponents of all inspiration, by so intimately amalgamating the letter and the spirit that every [ p. 184 ] criticism of the one shall seem a disparagement of the other, and thus enabling the results—the legitimate results of critical science—to be adroitly and plausibly misused for an illegitimate end.
The result of this misapplication of criticism on the one side, and of the nervous alarm which at once dreads it and yet contributes to cause it on the other, is to obscure the unassailable strength of the primary evidence for inspiration. For the highest evidence is self-evidence, which is independent of proof or demonstration from without. In the case’ of those abstract truths, like the mathematical axioms, which we intuitively recognize as soon as they are stated, this is obvious. But it holds equally good of concrete truths, or ‘facts, of immediate experience. Our belief in the reality of an object, which we see before our eyes, can neither be diminished nor increased by argument. Our perception of beauty cannot be heightened by analysis, or qualified by explanation. Our conviction of an intimate friend’s goodness is wholly independent of what other men may say of him in praise or blame. And it is upon such evidence that our belief in inspiration ultimately rests. Tradition may teach it, or criticism commend it, or authority command it ; but experience, personal experience, can alone assure us of its truth. Such experience may take various forms, and pass through various degrees. We may begin by being [ p. 185 ] struck with the spiritual power of the Old Testament, as contrasted with the other literature of the world; and then with its unity of tone, through all diversity of composition, its wonderful transcendence of the local and temporary elements that make it up; and then with its universality, its penetrating comprehension of every phase and condition of life. Thoughts of this kind will, in their turn, be confirmed and intensified, when we proceed to use the Bible in the conduct of our life, by its minute, its marvellous applicability to our every secret need; while now and again we are arrested, as with a lightning-flash, by sudden personal addresses of consolation or of warning that almost seem to rise into articulate speech. What we have had occasion to say already of the argument from experience in general applies, of course, equally to this experience in particular. It is incommunicable, and we can no more reason from it, with those who do not possess it, than reason from music with the deaf, or from colour with the blind. But at least we may make our meaning clear, and insist that the argument in question shall not be deprived of its due weight, either by misunderstanding or misrepresentation. Belief in the inspiration of the Bible may mean no more than the acceptance of a tradition on authority; like belief in a scientific statement that we cannot personally verify. But we mean more by [ p. 186 ] the phrase than this, when we use it as one of our reasons for faith in a personal God. We then mean that, whatever influence may have led us to the Bible, we have personally verified its claim, at least in one of the degrees above described ; further, that we have witnessed that verification in others ; and further, that with this double evidence before us, we are certain that such verification has gone on in every age, and given life to the authoritative tradition which has handed the Bible on. This is a fact of human history which cannot complacently be set aside ; and a fact which, strong as it is in itself, becomes incalculably stronger, when taken in the cumulative context of the other lines of evidence, philosophical, historical and moral, that all converge upon the selfsame point.
Any criticism of the human element in the Bible, which makes it more truly human, more analogous with the workings of the human spirit other-where, tends without question to enhance our sense of its reality and worth. But even if the very converse were the case, and such criticism were really destructive, its only effect would be to throw this fact of spiritual power into stronger relief.
Spiritual truths are always immeasurably greater than their vehicles of utterance, and are often best expressed where this disproportion is most clearly seen. More than half the force of language consists in its associations ; the hints, the side-lights, [ p. 187 ] the suggestions, which its words do not imply, yet habitually convey. And language itself is often a far less adequate medium of expression than many inarticulate things; sighs, smiles, tears, glances, gestures, sacraments, symbols, signs. And
‘truth in closest words shall fail,
When truth embodied in a tale
Shall enter in at lowly doors.’
This has always been notoriously the case with the Bible. Its power over the peasant is not diminished by his ignorance, nor its power over the scholar increased by his knowledge; for it is independent of the region in which ignorance and knowledge disagree. It flashes on the soul, through distorted or through clear conceptions; and in either case with equal ease. Doubtless when it spoke to Jerome and Augustine, its grammar and its history were less known than now. But it speaks to the modern student, of spiritual things, with neither increased nor diminished force. And this power in the Bible, which its believers attribute to inspiration, is a phenomenon that cannot otherwise be easily explained.
Further, this train of thought will throw a reflex light upon the other sacred books of the world. With all their imperfection and manifest inferiority, there is that in them which we can well believe to have been a vehicle of divine teaching to the nations they addressed, and if so to have been [ p. 188 ] inspired as their possessors believed. The Old Testament, we must remember, before it passed into Christian hands, was exclusively a national book; and our belief in it does not of necessity commit us to any particular theory, for or against the relative inspiration of other national books, however much we may regard them as ultimately destined to fade in its larger light. So far, therefore, from allowing the inspiration of the Old Testament to be discredited, by the fact that other and inferior books made a similar claim, we invert the reasoning, and argue that the claim of the books in question is corroborated by the inspiration of the Old Testament, which rests, as we believe, on such conclusive proof. Nor is there any novelty in such an idea; for it is only a special application of those principles of the Alexandrian school, to which we have already had occasion to refer. ‘ Perchance,’ says St. Clement of Alexandria, ‘ philosophy was given to the Greeks, directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks,’ And again, ‘The barbarian and Greek philosophy has torn off a fragment, not from the mythology of Dionysus, but from the theology of the Eternal Word[3].’
Briefly, to resume: in considering the prehistoric and subhistoric periods of human existence, we came to the conclusion that the picture they [ p. 189 ] presented was nowise inconsistent with a belief, that, behind the hidden scenes of life, God had always been revealing Himself, in however limited a measure, to the minds and hearts and consciences of men. The survey of pre-Christian history confirms the probability of such a belief. For we there find, throughout all races, not merely a tendency to seek after God, but a conviction that God or the gods have revealed and do reveal themselves to men ; while in the history and literature of one race the evidence of such a revelation, the intrinsic spiritual evidence, is overwhelmingly strong. It has, of course, been impossible, in so brief a compass, to trace the outlines of this process in any other than an abstract way ; but it is one which a detailed study of religious history, with the ample materials now at our command, cannot fail to substantiate in an impartial mind. The human side of religion is, of course, more open to observation than the divine, and hence its history is easily apt to be misrepresented, and misread, as merely the record of a gradual human discovery ; but in the eyes of any serious theist, who will be at the pains to think out his creed, this can only be regarded as a subordinate and secondary aspect of a gradual divine revelation. Nor is the gradual nature of the process, as we have seen, any argument against its being divine. Personal intercourse between men, to recur to our [ p. 190 ] previous analogy, is of necessity conditioned, qualified, limited, restrained by their respective capacities for appreciating and comprehending one another. ‘No man is a hero to his valet? not—as Hegel well explains the proverb—because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is only a valet. When we extend this law into the region of our intercourse with God, and consider what qualification such intercourse must demand on the part of man, the facts of history, so far from surprising us, will coincide with what we should expect. Among races whose average morality is low, and spiritual insight dim, few only, very few, will be capable of any inspiration ; while these few, in proportion to their fewness, will take long to raise the tone of others ; but as the general tone rises and men start from a higher plane, the relative number of religious minds will imperceptibly increase, and react with corresponding power upon their age, While as races differ in their pace of development, in their opportunities and in the use of them, in their capacities and in the drift of them, in their faithfulness to their own best light, the race which first attains the clearest moral and spiritual conceptions will tower aloft by that very fact; as the man of character towers at once over the man of strength, or intellect, or art, and thereby becomes the qualified recipient of a higher degree of revelation. This is in our judgement the course which [ p. 191 ] history has taken; and, moreover, it is the only course which we could antecedently conceive, that the self-revelation of a personal God would be likely to take, since a person can only be revealed, as such, to other persons, in graduated response to their own personal state. And it is immaterial whether we describe this process in terms of human merit or divine election ; since merit and election are essentially correlative, two aspects, the obverse and reverse, of one thing.
In the above remarks we have somewhat studiously understated our case, in order to avoid all questions that would inevitably lead off into side issues, and divert attention from the central point. Even so, we cannot, of course, expect an antitheistic opponent to accept at once our interpretation of facts. All that we can do is to point out those facts, as undeniable in their occurrence, unquestionable in their historic importance, suggestive, if not decisive, of their own spiritual interpretation, and in any case demanding to be very seriously weighed. Meanwhile, when we advance our other argumentative reasons for believing in a personal God, we can not admit the superficial but still common rejoinder that history is against us; since history, in our view, makes for us, in no uncertain terms, although, like the other elements of a cumulative argument, it must be read in its complete context to be seen in its true light.
| LECTURE VI. RELIGION IN THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD | Title page | LECTURE VIII. JESUS CHRIST THE DIVINE AND HUMAN PERSON |