endless series, you must presuppose
that somewhere there is found a revelation that proves its genuineness
by appealing to what your own interior light, your personal
acquaintance with the nature of a divine being, enables you to know as
the basis of all your further insight into the divine. The one who
appeals to revelation for guidance cannot then escape from basing his
appeal {24} upon something which involves a personal and individual
experience of what the need and the way of salvation is and of what
the divine nature and expression essentially involves.

Nor is this remark merely the unsympathetic comment of a philosophical
critic of what passes for revelation. The truth of the remark is
acknowledged by all those who have in one way or another insisted
that, without the witness of the spirit in the heart, no external
revelation could enlighten those who are in darkness; that miracles by
themselves are inadequate, because signs and wonders cannot teach the
divine will to those whom grace, working inwardly, does not prepare
for enlightenment; and that, in brief, if there is any religious
insight whatever accessible, it cannot come to us without our
individual experience as its personal foundation.

Now, the religious paradox is this: What one pretends or at least
hopes to know, when there is any question of religious insight, is
something which has to do with the whole nature and destiny and duty
and fate of man. For just such matters are in question when we talk,
not of how to earn our living or of how to get this or that worldly
prosperity, but about our need of salvation and about how to be saved.
So deep and so weighty are these matters, that to pretend to know
about them seems to involve knowing about the whole nature of things.
And when we conceive of the whole nature {25} of things as somehow
interested in us and in our salvation, as the religiously minded very
generally do, we call this nature of things divine, in a very familiar
sense of that word. Hence the higher religions generally undertake to
know, as they say, the divine. And by the divine they mean some real
power or principle or being that saves us or that may save us. But how
is this divine to be known? By revelation? But knowledge through
revelation can enlighten only the one in whose personal experience
there is somewhere an adequate interior light, which shines in the
darkness, and which permits him to test all revelations by a prior
acquainta