nes 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 suc