God from the world
they set up alongside of him a sphere and an activity to which his
relations were transient and accidental. No wonder that other men,
finding their satisfying activity within the sphere which was thus
separated from God, came to think of this absentee God as an appendage
to the scheme of things. But if man himself be inexplicable, save as
sharing in the wider life of universal reason, if the process of history
be realised as but the working out of an inherent divine purpose, the
manifestation of an indwelling divine force, then revelation denotes no
longer an interference with that evolution. It is a factor in that
evolution. It is but the normal relation of the immanent spirit of God
to the children of men at the crises of their fate. Then revelation is
an experience of men precisely in the line and according to the method
of all their nobler experiences. It is itself reasonable and moral.
Inspiration is the normal and continuous effect of the contact of the
God who is spirit with man who is spirit too. The relation is never
broken. But there are times in which it has been more particularly felt.
There have been personalities to whom in eminent degree this depth of
communion with God has been vouchsafed. To such persons and eras the
religious sense of mankind, by a true instinct, has tended to restrict
the words 'revelation' and 'inspiration.' This restriction, however,
signifies the separation of the grand experience from the ordinary, only
in degree and not in kind. Such an experience was that of prophets and
law-givers under the ancient covenant. Such an experience, in
immeasurably greater degree, was that of Jesus himself. Such a
turning-point in the life of the race was the advent of Christianity.
The world has not been wrong in calling the documents of these
revelations sacred books and in attributing to them divine authority. It
has been largely wrong _in the manner in which it construed their
authority_. It has been wholly wrong in imagining that the documents
themselves were the revelation. They are merely the record _of a
personal communion with the transcendent_. It was Lessing who first cast
these fertile ideas into the soil of modern thought. They were never
heartily taken up by Kant. One can think, however, with what enthusiasm
men recurred to them after their postulates had been verified and the
idea of God, of man and of the world which they implied, had been
confirmed by Fichte and S