uccessful.

It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when once
revelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernatural
power was needed to procure that access in the first instance. We
believe because we find our consciences satisfied, and we bring up our
children in such discipline of conscience that they too shall have
sufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth. And if we
had lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see the
spiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed without
any external evidence at all. But the first receivers of the message, to
whom the revelation was new, and, as must have often happened and we
actually know did happen, to whom it was hard to reconcile that
revelation with previous teaching, how sure were they to need some
other and outer evidence that it really came from God. The supernatural
in the form of miracles can never be the highest kind of evidence, can
never stand alone as evidence; but it seems to have been needed for the
first reception. And there seem to be minds that need it still, and to
all it is a help to find that reasonable ground can be shown for holding
that such evidence was originally given.

Revelation, in short, takes a higher stand than belongs to all other
teaching, and except for its having taken that higher stand it does not
appear that the highest teaching would have been possible. To look back
afterwards and say that we find a development or an evolution is easy.
And at first sight it seems to follow that, being an evolution, it may
well be no more than the outcome of the working of the natural forces.
But look closer and you see the undeniable fact that all these
developments by the working of natural forces have perished. Not
Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor the Stoics, nor Philo have been
able to lay hold of mankind, nor have their moral systems in any large
degree satisfied our spiritual faculty. Revelation, and revelation
alone, has taught us; and it is from the teaching of revelation that men
have obtained the very knowledge which some now use to show that there
was no need of revelation. That altruism which is now to displace the
command of God is nothing but the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount
robbed of its heavenly power, robbed of the great doctrine which
underlies the whole sermon. For that doctrine is the Fatherhood of God
which has been shown most especially in this,