at them by unaided reason.  But he would thus have arrived at them at a later period in the evolution of the race.  Hence revelation might be salutary or even necessary for certain times and places without being essential at all times or, for that matter, a permanent guarantee of the truth of religion.  There is nothing here which is new or original with Kant.  This line of reasoning was one by which men since Lessing had helped themselves over certain difficulties.  It is cited only to show how Kant, too, failed to transcend his age in some matters, although he so splendidly transcended it in others.

The orthodox had immemorially asserted that revelation imparted information not otherwise attainable, or not then attainable.  The rationalists here allege the same.  Kant is held fast in this view.  Assuredly what revelation imparts is not information of any sort whatsoever, not even information concerning God.  What revelation imparts is God himself, through the will and the affection, the practical reason.  Revelation is experience, not instruction.  The revealers are those who have experienced God, Jesus the foremost among them.  They have experienced God, whom then they have manifested as best they could, but far more significantly in what they were than in what they said.  There is surely the gravest exaggeration of what is statutory and external in that which Kant says of the relation of ethics and religion.  How can we know that to be a command of God, which does not commend itself in our own heart and conscience?  The traditionalist would have said, by documents miraculously confirmed.  It was not in consonance with his noblest ideas for Kant to say that.  On the other hand, that which I perceive to be my duty I, as religious man, feel to be a command of God, whether or not a mandate of God to that effect can be adduced.  Whether an alleged revelation from God inculcates such a truth or duty may be incidental.  In a sense it is accidental.  The content of all historic revelation is conditioned in the circumstances of the man to whom the revelation is addressed.  It is clear that the whole matter of revelation is thus apprehended by Kant with more externality than we should have believed.  His thought is still essentially archaic and dualistic.  He is, therefore, now and then upon the point of denying that such a thing as revelation is possible.  The very idea of revelation, in this form, does violence to his fundamental principle of the autonomy of the human reason and will.  At many points in his reflection it is transparently clear that nothing can ever come to a man, or be given forth by him, which is not creatively shaped by himself.  As regards revelation, however, Kant never frankly took that step.  The implications of his own system would have led him to that step.  They led to an idea of revelation which was psychologically in harmony with the assumptions of his system, and historically could be conceived as taking place without the interjection