ideal of the search after truth characteristic of science should have been transferred to the sphere of religion, and Pascal is perhaps right when he writes that there are two attitudes, and two only, which are worthy of a reasonable man-either to serve God with his whole heart, because he knows Him, or to seek Him with his whole heart, because he knows Him not.1 Nevertheless it is quite certain that Christianity came originally into the world not as the religion of the search of man for God, but as the religion of the search of God for man. Earlier in these lectures the point was made that it was characteristic of the first preachers of the Gospel that they were men who claimed to have found. They were assured that they had found the living and true God, not primarily in their own 'feeling, experience, thought and will,' but in Jesus Christ and in the communion of His Spirit. They had found Him, because they had first been found of Him. They had been as sheep going astray'; they were now 'returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of their souls.' They had the assurance that they were' in Him that is true': and therefore they spoke with authority a message which (in the phrase of S. Paul) was proclaimed 'in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.'

We are thus brought up afresh against the problem of our first lecture-the problem of how to combine the authority of Revelation with the claims

1 'Il n'y a que deux sortes de personnes qu'on puisse appeler raisonnables ou ceux qui servent Dieu de tout leur cœur, parce qu'ils le connaissent; ou ceux qui le cherchent de tout leur cœur, parce qu'ils ne le connaissent pas.' (Pascal, Pensées.)

2 P. 23, supra.

of moral, intellectual, and spiritual freedom. What appears clear is that just as we saw no hope of remedy for the spiritual sickness of the modern world in a régime of Authority without Freedom, so neither is there any solution of our problems to be found in a mere insistence upon Freedom without Authority. There is need of the authority of corporate historical tradition-the tested and criticised experience of the past. There is need, in an even more vital sense, of the authority of Revelation.

CHAPTER V

THE AUTHORITY OF REVELATION

THE term Revelation, to any one familiar with traditional religious language, is wont to suggest one or other of two antitheses. It suggests either an opposition, real or supposed, between Revelation and Reason; or else it suggests an opposition or contrast between Religion as 'Natural' and Religion as' Revealed.' Both these antitheses have in recent years been criticised in an illuminating fashion by Mr. Clement Webb, the Oriel Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford, upon whose discussion of them much of what I have to say in this lecture has been based.1

It was maintained in the eighteenth century, both by the so-called Deists and by their orthodox opponents, that there were certain truths of Religion -and those the most important-at which man could arrive, and in fact did arrive, as the phrase went, by the light of Nature,' without any need for a Revelation. Rational reflection upon the

1 C. C. J. Webb, Problems in the Relations of God and Man (Nisbet, 1911). My obligations to this book in the earlier part of what follows are as great as is my indebtedness to Troeltsch's Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte in the later part.

world and its order and beauty was supposed to justify the inference to its creation by a good and wise God, who must therefore be assumed to exist. Rational reflection upon the data of human nature and the fact of conscience was supposed to justify the inferences that man stood in relation to a Moral Governor to whom he was responsible, that the will was free, that duty was obligatory, and that the soul (as many were prepared to add) was immortal. These truths, it was held, of God, Freedom, and Immortality formed the content of what was described as 'Natural Religion,' and were supposed to be universally accepted—at least in general, and among the higher races of mankind. No special revelation was required to establish their truth, and they tended to be regarded as the common substratum of the various religions of mankind. In so far as the specific doctrines of a particular religion (for example, Christianity), which claimed to be a product of Revelation,' went beyond the so-called truths of Natural Religion (i.e. did more than simply reaffirm them), they were regarded by their champions as essentially supplementary to these truths, and by their opponents as unnecessary or even as mischievous. Both sides, that is to say, in the Deist controversy were agreed in regarding certain truths of religion as discoverable by man, independently of any process of Divine Revelation. The further tenets of' Revealed' Religion tended to be regarded even by those who maintained their credibility and importance, as being essentially a superstructure built upon these foundations.

To-day it is clear that the whole point of view

which I have just indicated is in large measure obsolete. We do not now speak of the Religion of Nature,' nor do we pretend that the tenets which once were comprised under such a description are either universally held or generally admitted: they are as much in dispute as are any other dogmas of religion or of ethics. Nor are they common, in anything like the same sense, to all the great religions of the world. Still less are they as old as the Creation,' if by that phrase it is intended to suggest that they formed part of the religious outlook of primitive man. Manifestly they did not. The savage believes, not in God, but in gods. His beliefs about immortality, even though it be granted that he commonly entertains such beliefs, are not as a rule of a very attractive or lofty kind. And his morality is that of his tribe, regulated by tribal custom and taboo. The savage is very far from speculating, in the manner of an eighteenth-century thinker, on the subjects of conscience and its obligations, or of his own relationship and responsibility towards the Moral Governor of the Universe.'

Two things in particular have made it difficult for educated persons to-day to draw the kind of distinction which used to be drawn between Revealed' and 'Natural' Religion, viz: (1) The idea of evolution, which has vaguely but powerfully affected men's way of regarding things, even in respect of matters widely remote from the strictly biological context in which it was applied by Charles Darwin, and (2) the results of modern scientific study of the subject of Comparative Religion. The latter study, vigorously pursued since the publication