human race, and room is found in this for a special authoritative Revelation through chosen channels, according to a Divine Election and culminating in the Incarnation and redemptive work of Jesus Christ.

2. That a Divine Revelation is possible and probable in the sense of a direct communication between God and man, and an activity on His part in Divine Self-disclosure and communication with us is the necessary condition of any discovery on our part of His existence and purpose.

3. That such Divine Revelation takes place preeminently in the realm of human life. It is essentially a disclosure of a Person to persons. The substance of the disclosure may become embodied as a written record in a book or books, in religious literature, which consequently, in a sense, may be spoken of as derived ultimately from a Divine source.

4. That no claim to infallibility either for persons or for written records can be substantiated. The conditions for a Divine Self-disclosure to the human personalities are such as to preclude the possibility of infallible truth being transmitted from God to man unpolluted by human error. In every case the Divine Self-revelation is conditioned and limited by the capacity of the recipient and the imperfections of the medium through which it is made. The human element in all Revelation must destroy any claim to unquestioned infallibility.

5. That Revelation regarded as the action of the Divine Spirit upon the spirit of man must not in any sense be taken as involving a violation of the human personality or such an overriding of its freedom as to reduce the human to the level of a mechanical instrument through which the Divine functions. Inspiration at its highest is the human freely and lovingly re-thinking God's thoughts after Him, and thus revealing and interpreting Him to others.

6. That the antithesis between Natural and Revealed Religion is a false one. All human thought about God is in a sense the result of the functioning of the immanent Divine Spirit in the world and in human life. Within the wider process of general Revelation there is room for special

Revelation through chosen and selected channels, in accordance with the Divine purpose in the government of the world and God's providential guidance in human history.

Thus the purpose of Revelation is to be construed primarily in the light of God's educative purpose for the world and for mankind. It is thus a part of the larger philosophy of history which reads the whole drama of the world's events as part of a Divine Plan with a redemptive purpose centring in man and the salvation of the human race. Here the Christian World-view' parts company with the Greek naturalistic conceptions. Whereas for Greek thought the cosmic process may be construed apart from man's destiny, for the Christian the whole of history is teleology, essentially anthropocentric, viewing man as the end and aim of creation, Nature and Nature's processes as subservient to man's needs. In and through the course of the world's events God is working His purpose out. Windelband points to this as the distinguishing feature of the Christian outlook in contrast to that of Neo-Platonism.

In contrast to Greek thought on the subject of the philosophy of history,

Christianity' he writes' found from the beginning the essence of the whole world-movement in the experiences of personalities: for it external nature was but a theatre for the development of the relation of person to person, and especially of the relation of the finite spirit to the deity. And to this were added, as a further determining power, the principle of love, the consciousness of the solidarity of the human race, the deep conviction of the universal sinfulness, and the faith in a common redemption. All this led to regarding the history of the fall and of redemption as the true metaphysical import of the world's reality, and so instead of an eternal process of Nature, the drama of universal history as an onward flow of events that were activities of freewill, became the content of Christian metaphysics.

'There is perhaps no better proof of the power of the impression which the personality of Jesus of Nazareth had left, than the fact that all doctrines of Christianity, however widely they may otherwise diverge philosophically or mythically, are yet at one in seeking in him and his appearance the centre of

VOL. XCVII.-NO. CXCIII.

H

the world's history. By him the conflict between good and evil, between light and darkness, is decided. . . . With almost all Christian thinkers, accordingly, the world's history appears as a course of inner events which draw after them the origin and fortunes of the world of sense,-a course which takes place once for all. It is essentially only Origen who holds fast to the fundamental character of Greek science so far as to teach the eternity of the world-process.'1

It behoves us to weigh well the significance of this contrast between the Greek and the Christian world-view. Herein lies the real basis for a doctrine of special Revelation and the distinctive teaching of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation-a doctrine which, once accepted, carries with it implications involving, as we have seen, a revolution in the whole outlook upon the meaning and significance of the world's history in relation to God and His providential government. The Christian world-view is distinctive, and it must inevitably issue in a Christian philosophy in which alone the concept of Divine Revelation, universal and special, can find a true home and a natural setting.

If we believe that God is the Creator of the world and that man is created in His image for a definite Divine purpose of love; if, further, we accept the fact of human sin in its true significance in relation to God as rebellion and selfwill-a misuse of a conferred freedom granted as the sine qua non of a true ethical and spiritual development on the part of men made in the likeness of God and destined to become the sons of God; if, again, we believe in God's providential guidance in the world's history, in the life of the whole human race and His loving care for the education and development of the finite individual, we cannot doubt but that in and through the whole historic process God will be active, and that in all the long struggle of the human race towards an ideal of truth, goodness and beauty, God's Presence in Divine Grace will be granted in ever-increasing measure, and His Light be vouchsafed to the sons of men according to their need and their capacity to receive His Revelation. Taught by Him, they will learn to read His 1 Op. cit. pp. 256-7.

message in Nature, in history and in human life, not less in the commonplace events of a daily routine than in the more intimate communings of the human soul in its best moments of prayer and elevated thought. Man's whole growth in knowledge will be itself a revelation of the Divine Truth-his whole growth in grace a revelation of the Divine Holy Love of One who is about our path and about our bed, who marks our down-sitting and uprising and our thoughts long before.

All this is involved in the Christian outlook upon life which can regard Divine Revelation as pre-eminently reasonable the natural outcome of God's Love in Selfdisclosure and in redemptive activity. That He should wait with an infinite patience for the developing capacity of His children to apprehend His Presence and understand His messages; that He should disclose Himself in fuller measure as time went on; that He should speak by divers portions and in divers manners, through Hebrew prophet, Greek sage and Roman statesman, as men were able to assimilate the Word, and finally, in the fullness of time, in His Son-all this, in its true setting, is a phenomenon, natural and rational, to the mind and heart of any man who seeks to do justice to that religious nature which is his by right of creation and responding to which he finds himself in the deepest recesses of his being at one with Reality.

III

Many difficulties can be avoided if we keep steadily before us the reality of a personal relationship between God and man as the condition (a) of Divine Revelation, (b) of man's Inspiration, and consequently (c) of man's discovery regarding GOD, Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the meaning, value and destiny of human life. The conditions of such a relationship exclude any idea of man's deification as the sine qua non of Divine Revelation. The truth in this conception lies in the fact that man's approximation to the likeness of God in spiritual communion and ethical achievement enables him the more clearly and fully to disclose

to his fellow-men the revelation of Himself which God is continually making in and to human personalities in living union with Himself. The human is not in any sense a passive instrument for the transmission of the Divine message or an impersonal pipe through which the Divine Truth is poured. There is a close personal co-operation between man and God which involves limitations on the part of both on God's side the fact that His Self-disclosure must be such as the human can receive and in such terms as the human can assimilate; on man's side the fact that the reception of the Divine Self-revelation is conditioned all through by the state of heart and mind and will of the man himself in relation to the Divine. Hence only the pure in heart can see God, and the Vision which the man strives to behold in order to transmit it to others is necessarily beclouded by the degree of sinfulness in the man himself in communion with his Maker. Hence the impossibility of any claim to infallibility in the message which the man thinks he has received from God. The truth, in its transmission from the Divine, through the human, to us, has necessarily become coloured by the human medium through which it has had to pass. This discolouration is due to the imperfection of the human medium as sinful, and to the fact that the human medium is limited by an existence in time and space. Hence the Divine Truth when it reaches us has passed through a human personality compelled by its very constitution to think in spatial imagery and to express itself in terms of human thought. A large element of symbolism must therefore necessarily enter as a clothing for the Divine Truth as it reaches us. God must in this sense be ever revealing Himself to us in parables, and His parabolic teaching is the only way in which we can be taught whilst here seeing as through a glass darkly and knowing in part. The only criterion of judgement, therefore, which we may legitimately apply to the testing of any truth claiming to be derived from Divine Revelation will be its value as the highest and best view of God and its correspondence to the deepest and truest ethical and spiritual instincts we possess. It