Chapter 10

One last point. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the process by which psychologically a man arrives at a religious or other truth and the reasons which make it true. Because I deny that the truth of God's existence can reasonably be accepted on the basis of an immediate judgement or intuition, I do not deny for one moment that an apparently intuitive conviction of the truth of Christianity, as of other religions, actually exists. The religious belief of the vast majority of persons has always rested, and must always rest, very largely upon tradition, education, environment, authority of one kind or another--authority supported or confirmed by a varying measure of independent reflection or experience. And, just where the influence of authority is most complete and overwhelming, it is least felt to be authority. The person whose beliefs are most entirely produced by education or environment is very often most convinced that his opinions are due solely to his own immediate insight. But even where this is not the case--even where the religious man is taking a new departure, revolting against his environment and adopting a religious belief absolutely at variance with the established {135} belief of his society--I do not contend that such new religious ideas are always due to unobserved and unanalysed processes of reasoning. That in most cases, when a person adopts a new creed, he would himself give some reason for his change of faith is obvious, though the reason which he would allege would not in all cases be the one which really caused the change of religion. There may be other psychological influences which cause belief besides the influence of environment: in some cases the psychological causes of such beliefs are altogether beyond analysis. But, though I do not think M. Auguste Sabatier justified in assuming that a belief is true, and must come directly from God, simply because we cannot easily explain its genesis by the individual's environment and psychological antecedents, it is of extreme importance to insist that it is not proved to be false because it was not adopted primarily, or at all, on adequate theoretical grounds. A belief which arose at first entirely without logical justification, or it may be on intellectual grounds subsequently discovered to be inadequate or false, may nevertheless be one which can and does justify itself to the reflective intellect of the person himself or of other persons. And many new, true, and valuable beliefs have undoubtedly arisen in this way. Even in physical Science we all know that there is no Logic of discovery. It {136} is a familiar criticism upon the Logic of Bacon that he ignored or under-estimated the part that is played in scientific thinking by hypothesis, and the consequent need of scientific imagination. Very often the new scientific idea comes into the discoverer's mind, he knows not how or why. Some great man of Science--I think, Helmholtz--said of a brilliant discovery of his, 'It was given to me.' But it was not true because it came to Helmholtz in this way, but because it was subsequently verified and proved. Now, undoubtedly, religious beliefs, new and old, often do present themselves to the minds of individuals in an intuitive and unaccountable way. They may subsequently be justified at the bar of Reason: and yet Reason might never have discovered them for itself. They would never have come into the world unless they had presented themselves at first to some mind or other as intuitions, inspirations, immediate Revelations: and yet (once again) the fact that they so present themselves does not by itself prove them to be true.

I may perhaps illustrate what I mean by the analogy of Poetry. I suppose few people will push the sound-without-sense view of Poetry to the length of denying that poets do sometimes see and teach us truths. No one--least of all one who is not even a verse-maker himself--can, I suppose, analyse the intellectual process by which a poet {137} gets at his truths. The insight by which he arrives at them is closely connected with emotions of various kinds: and yet the truths are not themselves emotions, nor do they in all cases merely state the fact that the poet has felt such and such emotions. They are propositions about the nature of things, not merely about the poet's mental states. And yet the truths are not true because the poet _feels_ them, as he would say--no matter how passionately he feels them. There is no separate organ of poetic truth: and not all the things that poets have passionately felt are true. Some highly poetical thoughts have been very false thoughts. But, if they are true, they must be true for good logical reasons, which a philosophical critic may even in some cases by subsequent reflection be able to disentangle and set forth. Yet the poet did not get at those truths by way of philosophical reflection: or, if he was led to them by any logical process, he could not have analysed his own reasoning. The poet could not have produced the arguments of the philosopher: the philosopher without the poet's lead might never have seen the truth. I am afraid I must not stay to defend or illustrate this position: I will only say that the poets I should most naturally go to for illustration would be such poets as Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though perhaps all three are a little {138} too consciously philosophic to supply the ideal illustration.

I do not think it will be difficult to apply these reflections to the case of religious and ethical truth. All religious truth, as I hold, depends logically upon inference; inference from the whole body of our experiences, among which the most important place is held by our immediate moral judgements. The truth of Theism is in that sense a truth discernible by Reason. But it does not follow that, when it was first discovered, it was arrived at by the inferences which I have endeavoured to some extent to analyse, or by one of the many lines of thought which may lead to the same conclusions. It was not the Greek philosophers so much as the Jewish prophets who taught the world true Monotheism. Hosea, Amos, the two Isaiahs probably arrived at their Monotheism largely by intuition; or (in so far as it was by inferential processes) the premisses of their argument were very probably inherited beliefs of earlier Judaism which would not commend themselves without qualification to a modern thinker. In its essentials the Monotheism of Isaiah is a reasonable belief; we accept it because it is reasonable, not because Isaiah had an intuition that it was true; for we have rejected many things which to Isaiah probably seemed no less self-evidently true. And yet it would be a profound mistake to assume that {139} the philosophers who now defend Isaiah's creed would ever have arrived at it without Isaiah's aid.

I hope that by this time you will have seen to some extent the spirit in which I am approaching the special subject of to-day's lecture--the question of Revelation. In some of the senses that have been given to it, the idea of Revelation is one which hardly any one trained in the school--that is to say, any school--of modern Philosophy is likely to accept. The idea that pieces of information have been supernaturally and without any employment of their own intellectual faculties communicated at various times to particular persons, their truth being guaranteed by miracles--in the sense of interruptions of the ordinary course of nature by an extraordinary fiat of creative power--is one which is already rejected by most modern theologians, even among those who would generally be called rather conservative theologians. I will not now argue the question whether any miraculous event, however well attested, could possibly be sufficient evidence for the truth of spiritual teaching given in attestation of it. I will merely remark that to any one who has really appreciated the meaning of biblical criticism, it is scarcely conceivable that the evidence for miracles could seem sufficiently cogent to constitute such an attestation. In proof of that I will merely appeal to the modest, apologetic, tentative tone in which {140} scholarly and sober-minded theologians who would usually be classed among the defenders of miracles--men like the Bishop of Ely or Professor Sanday of Oxford--are content to speak of such evidences. They admit the difficulty of proving that such miraculous events really happened thousands of years ago on the strength of narratives written at the very earliest fifty years after the alleged event, and they invite us rather to believe in the miracles on the evidence of a Revelation already accepted than to accept the revelation on the evidence of the miracles. I shall have a word to say on this question of miracles next time; but for the present I want to establish, or rather without much argument to put before you for your consideration, this position; that the idea of revelation cannot be admitted in the sense of a communication of truth by God, claiming to be accepted not on account of its own intrinsic reasonableness or of the intellectual or spiritual insight of the person to whom it is made, but on account of the historical evidence for miraculous occurrences said to have taken place in connexion with such communication. The most that can reasonably be contended for is that super-normal occurrences of this kind may possess a certain corroborative value in support of a Revelation claiming to be accepted on other grounds.

What place then is left for the idea of Revelation? {141} I will ask you to go back for a moment to the conclusions of our first lecture. We saw that from the idealistic point of view all knowledge may be looked upon as a partial communication to the human soul of the thoughts or experiences of the divine Mind. There is a sense then in which all truth is revealed truth. In a more important sense, and a sense more nearly allied to that of ordinary usage, all moral and spiritual truth may be regarded as revealed truth. And in particular those immediate judgements about good and evil in which we have found the sole means of knowing the divine character and purposes must be looked on as divinely implanted knowledge--none the less divinely implanted because it is, in the ordinary sense of the words, quite natural, normal, and consistent with law. Nobody but an Atheist ought to talk about the unassisted human intellect: no one who acquiesces in the old doctrine that Conscience is the voice of God ought either on the one hand to deny the existence of Revelation, or on the other to speak of Revelation as if it were confined to the Bible.

But because we ascribe some intrinsic power of judging about spiritual and moral matters to the ordinary human intellect, it would be a grievous mistake to assume that all men have an equal measure of this power. Because we assert that all moral and spiritual truth comes to men by {142} Revelation, it does not follow that there are not degrees of Revelation. And it is one of the special characteristics of religious and moral truth that it is in a peculiar degree dependent upon the superior insight of those exceptional men to whom have been accorded extraordinary degrees of moral and spiritual insight. Even in Science, as we have seen, we cannot dispense with genius: very ordinary men can satisfy themselves of the truth of a hypothesis when it is once suggested, though they would have been quite incompetent to discover that hypothesis for themselves. Still more unquestionably are there moral and spiritual truths which, when once discovered, can be seen to be true by men of very commonplace intellect and commonplace character. The truths are seen and passed on to others, who accept them partly on authority, by way of social inheritance and tradition; partly because they are confirmed in various degrees by their own independent judgement and experience. Here then--in the discovery of new spiritual truth--we encounter that higher and exceptional degree of spiritual and ethical insight which in a special and pre-eminent sense we ought to regard as Revelation or Inspiration. Here there is room, in the evolution of Religion and Morality, for the influence of the men of moral or religious genius--the Prophets, the Apostles, the Founders and Reformers of Religions: and, since {143} moral and spiritual insight are very closely connected with character, for the moral hero, the leader of men, the Saint. Especially to the new departures, the turning-points, the epoch-making discoveries in ethical and religious progress connected with the appearance of such men, we may apply the term Revelation in a supreme or culminating sense.

It is, as it seems to me, extremely important that we should not altogether divorce the idea of Revelation from those kinds of moral and religious truth which are arrived at by the ordinary working of the human intellect. The ultimate moral judgements no doubt must be intuitive or immediate, but in our deductions from them--in their application both to practical life and to theories about God and the Universe--there is room for much intellectual work of the kind which we commonly associate rather with the philosopher than with the prophet. But the philosopher may be also a prophet. The philosophically trained Greek Fathers were surely right in recognizing that men like Socrates and Plato were to be numbered among those to whom the Spirit of God had spoken in an exceptional degree. They too spoke in the power of the indwelling Logos. But still it is quite natural that we should associate the idea of Revelation or Inspiration more particularly with that kind of moral and intellectual discovery which comes to exceptional men by way {144} of apparent intuition or immediate insight. We associate the idea of inspiration rather with the poet than with the man of Science, and with the prophet rather than with the systematic philosopher. It is quite natural, therefore, that we should associate the idea of Revelation more especially with religious teachers of the intuitive order like the Jewish prophets than with even those philosophers who have also been great practical teachers of Ethics and Religion. But it is most important to recognize that there is no hard and fast line to be drawn between the two classes. The Jewish prophets did not arrive at their ideas about God without a great deal of hard thinking, though the thinking is for the most part unexplicit and the mode of expression poetic. 'Their idols are silver and gold; even the work of men's hands. . . . They have hands and handle not; feet have they and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.' There is real hard reasoning underlying such noble rhetoric, though the Psalmist could not perhaps have reduced his argument against Polytheism and Idolatry to the form of a dialectical argument like Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas. In the highest instance of all--the case of our Lord Jesus Christ himself--a natural instinct of reverence is apt to deter us from analysing how he came by the truth that he communicated to men; but, though I would not deny that the deepest {145} truth came to him chiefly by a supreme gift of intuition, there are obvious indications of profound intellectual thought in his teaching. Recall for a moment his arguments against the misuse of the Sabbath, against the superstition of unclean meats, against the Sadducean objection to the Resurrection. I want to avoid at present dogmatic phraseology; so I will only submit in passing that this is only what we should expect if the early Church was right in thinking of Christ as the supreme expression in the moral and religious sphere of the Logos or Reason of God.

The thought of great religious thinkers is none the less Revelation because it involves the use of their reasoning faculties. But I guarded myself against being supposed, in contending for the possibility of a philosophical or metaphysical knowledge of God, to assume that religious truth had always come to men in this way, or even that the greatest steps in religious progress have usually taken the form of explicit reasoning. Once again, it is all-important to distinguish between the way in which a belief comes to be entertained and the reasons for its being true. All sorts of psychological causes have contributed to generate religious beliefs. And when once we have discovered grounds in our own reflection or experience for believing them to be true, there is no reason why we should not regard all of them as {146} pieces of divine revelation. Visions and dreams, for instance, had a share in the development of religious ideas. We might even admit the possibility that the human race would never have been led to think of the immortality of the soul but for primitive ideas about ghosts suggested by the phenomena of dreams. The truth of the doctrine is neither proved nor disproved by such an account of its origin; but, if that belief is true and dreams have played a part in the process by which man has been led to it, no Theist surely can refuse to recognize the divine guidance therein. And so, at a higher level, we are told by the author of the Acts that St. Peter was led to accept the great principle of Gentile Christianity by the vision of a sheet let down from heaven. There is no reason why that account should not be historically true. The psychologist may very easily account for St. Peter's vision by the working in his mind of the liberal teaching of Stephen, the effect of his fast, and so on. But that does not prevent us recognizing that vision as an instrument of divine Revelation. We at the present day do not believe in this fundamental principle of Christianity because of that dream of St. Peter's; for we know that dreams are not always truth or always edifying. We believe in that principle on other grounds--the convincing grounds (among others) which St. Luke puts into St. Peter's mouth {147} on the following morning. But that need not prevent our recognizing that God may have communicated that truth to the men of that generation--and through them to us--partly by means of that dream.

The two principles then for which I wish to contend are these: (1) that Revelation is a matter of degree; (2) that no Revelation can be accepted in the long run merely because it came to a particular person in a peculiarly intuitive or immediate way. It may be that M. Auguste Sabatier is right in seeing the most immediate contact of God with the human soul in those intuitive convictions which can least easily be accounted for by ordinary psychological causes; in those new departures of religious insight, those unaccountable comings of new thoughts into the mind, which constitute the great crises or turning-points of religious history. But, though the coming of such thoughts may often be accepted by the individual as direct evidences of a divine origin, the Metaphysician, on looking back upon them, cannot treat the fact that the psychologist cannot account for them, as a convincing proof of such an origin, apart from our judgement upon the contents of what claims to be a revelation. Untrue thoughts and wicked thoughts sometimes arise equally unaccountably: the fact that they do so is even now accounted for by some as a sufficient proof of direct diabolic suggestion. When we have judged the {148} thought to be true or the suggestion to be good, then we, who on other grounds believe in God, may see in it a piece of divine revelation, but not till then.

From this point of view it is clear that we are able to recognize various degrees and various kinds of divine revelation in many different Religions, philosophies, systems of ethical teaching. We are able to recognize the importance to the world of the great historical Religions, in all of which we can acknowledge a measure of Revelation. The fact that the truths which they teach (in so far as they are true) can now be recognized as true by philosophic thought, does not show that the world would ever have evolved those thoughts, apart from the influence of the great revealing personalities. Philosophy itself--the Philosophy of the professed philosophers--has no doubt contributed a very important element to the content of the historical Religions; but it is only in proportion as they become part of a system of religious teaching, and the possession of an organized religious community, that the ideas of the philosophers really come home to multitudes of men, and shape the history of the world. Nor in many cases would the philosophers themselves have seen what they have seen but for the great epoch-making thoughts of the great religion-making periods. And the same considerations which show the importance of religious movements in the {149} past tend also to emphasize the importance of the historical Religion and of the religious community in which it is enshrined in modern times. Because religious truth can now be defended by the use of our ordinary intellectual faculties, and because all possess these faculties in some degree, it is absurd to suppose that the ordinary individual, if left to himself, would be likely to evolve a true religious system for himself--any more than he would be likely to discern for himself the truths that were first seen by Euclid or Newton if he were not taught them. To under-estimate the importance of the great historical Religions and their creators has been the besetting sin of technical religious Philosophy. Metaphysicians have in truth often written about Religion in great ignorance as to the real facts of religious history.