or at a
bank, in signing a cheque, reveals to his bank his will that such and
such funds, which he already has on deposit at the bank, shall be paid
to the order of a certain person. How is the bank able to recognise
this revelation of the depositor's will? The answer is: The bank,
acting in the usual order of business, regards this revelation as
genuine because its officers already know, with sufficient assurance,
the depositor's signature, and can therefore recognise it at sight,
subject, of course, to a certain usually negligible risk of forgery.
Apply the principle here involved to the case of the one who
acknowledges the genuineness of a divine revelation. In asserting: "I
know that this revelation is from God," the believer in the revelation
asserts, in substance, that in some sense and by some means he
personally knows, as it were, the divine signature; knows by what
marks the divine being reveals himself. This is the vast presumption,
if you will, upon which the believer in revelation depends for his
assurance. He knows God's autograph. Now, how shall such a knowledge
of the divine autograph have arisen in the mind of the individual
believer? Has this believer first wandered through all the worlds to
learn how the various orders of beings express themselves, what marks
of their wisdom and of their interest in humanity {23} they show, and
who amongst them are, or who alone is, actually divine?

I repeat--the stupendous question thus suggested is one which I
mention not in any spirit of cavil, but solely for the sake of
directing us on our further way, and of calling attention at the
outset to a fact upon which all that is most vital in the religious
consciousness has in every age depended. Every acceptance of a
revelation, I say, depends upon something that, in the individual's
mind, must be prior to this acceptance. And this something is an
assurance that the believer already knows the essential marks by which
a divine revelation is to be distinguished from any other sort of
report. In other words, a revelation can be viewed by you as a divine
revelation only in case you hold, for whatever reason, or for no
reason, that you already are acquainted with the signature which the
divine will attaches to its documents, that you know the marks of any
authentic revelation by which a divine will can make itself known to
you. Unless, then, you are to make one supposed revelation depend for
its warrant upon another in an