ly 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 r