religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity.  The religion of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely the current morality.  Their explanation of the religion of others is that it is merely the current morality plus certain unprovable assumptions.  Indeed, they may think it to be but the obstinate adherence to these assumptions minus the current morality.  It is impossible that this shallow view should prevail.  To overcome it, however, there is need of a philosophy which shall give not less, but greater scope to reason and at the same time an inward meaning to revelation.

This brings us to the third possible position, to which the best thinkers of the nineteenth century have advanced.  So long as deistic views of the relation of God to man and the world held the field, revelation meant something interjected ab extra into the established order of things.  The popular theology which so abhorred deism was yet essentially deistic in its notion of God and of his separation from the world.  Men did not perceive that by thus separating God from the world they set up alongside of him a sphere and an activity to which his relations were transient and accidental.  No wonder that other men, finding their satisfying activity within the sphere which was thus separated from God, came to think of this absentee God as an appendage to the scheme of things.  But if man himself be inexplicable, save as sharing in the wider life of universal reason, if the process of history be realised as but the working out of an inherent divine purpose, the manifestation of an indwelling divine force, then revelation denotes no longer an interference with that evolution.  It is a factor in that evolution.  It is but the normal relation of the immanent spirit of God to the children of men at the crises of their fate.  Then revelation is an experience of men precisely in the line and according to the method of all their nobler experiences.  It is itself reasonable and moral.  Inspiration is the normal and continuous effect of the contact of the God who is spirit with man who is spirit too.  The relation is never broken.  But there are times in which it has been more particularly felt.  There have been personalities to whom in eminent degree this depth of communion with God has been vouchsafed.  To such persons and eras the religious sense of mankind, by a true instinct, has tended to restrict the words ‘revelation’ and ‘inspiration.’  This restriction, however, signifies the separation of the grand experience from the ordinary, only in degree and not in kind.  Such an experience was that of prophets and law-givers under the ancient covenant.  Such an experience, in immeasurably greater degree, was that of Jesus himself.  Such a turning-point in the life of the race was the advent of Christianity.  The world has not been wrong in calling the documents of