h miraculous
events really happened thousands of years ago on the strength of
narratives written at the very earliest fifty years after the alleged
event, and they invite us rather to believe in the miracles on the
evidence of a Revelation already accepted than to accept the revelation
on the evidence of the miracles. I shall have a word to say on this
question of miracles next time; but for the present I want to
establish, or rather without much argument to put before you for your
consideration, this position; that the idea of revelation cannot be
admitted in the sense of a communication of truth by God, claiming to
be accepted not on account of its own intrinsic reasonableness or of
the intellectual or spiritual insight of the person to whom it is made,
but on account of the historical evidence for miraculous occurrences
said to have taken place in connexion with such communication. The
most that can reasonably be contended for is that super-normal
occurrences of this kind may possess a certain corroborative value in
support of a Revelation claiming to be accepted on other grounds.

What place then is left for the idea of Revelation? {141} I will ask
you to go back for a moment to the conclusions of our first lecture.
We saw that from the idealistic point of view all knowledge may be
looked upon as a partial communication to the human soul of the
thoughts or experiences of the divine Mind. There is a sense then in
which all truth is revealed truth. In a more important sense, and a
sense more nearly allied to that of ordinary usage, all moral and
spiritual truth may be regarded as revealed truth. And in particular
those immediate judgements about good and evil in which we have found
the sole means of knowing the divine character and purposes must be
looked on as divinely implanted knowledge--none the less divinely
implanted because it is, in the ordinary sense of the words, quite
natural, normal, and consistent with law. Nobody but an Atheist ought
to talk about the unassisted human intellect: no one who acquiesces in
the old doctrine that Conscience is the voice of God ought either on
the one hand to deny the existence of Revelation, or on the other to
speak of Revelation as if it were confined to the Bible.

But because we ascribe some intrinsic power of judging about spiritual
and moral matters to the ordinary human intellect, it would be a
grievous mistake to assume that all men have an equal measure of thi