eligious thinkers is none the less Revelation
because it involves the use of their reasoning faculties. But I
guarded myself against being supposed, in contending for the
possibility of a philosophical or metaphysical knowledge of God, to
assume that religious truth had always come to men in this way, or even
that the greatest steps in religious progress have usually taken the
form of explicit reasoning. Once again, it is all-important to
distinguish between the way in which a belief comes to be entertained
and the reasons for its being true. All sorts of psychological causes
have contributed to generate religious beliefs. And when once we have
discovered grounds in our own reflection or experience for believing
them to be true, there is no reason why we should not regard all of
them as {146} pieces of divine revelation. Visions and dreams, for
instance, had a share in the development of religious ideas. We might
even admit the possibility that the human race would never have been
led to think of the immortality of the soul but for primitive ideas
about ghosts suggested by the phenomena of dreams. The truth of the
doctrine is neither proved nor disproved by such an account of its
origin; but, if that belief is true and dreams have played a part in
the process by which man has been led to it, no Theist surely can
refuse to recognize the divine guidance therein. And so, at a higher
level, we are told by the author of the Acts that St. Peter was led to
accept the great principle of Gentile Christianity by the vision of a
sheet let down from heaven. There is no reason why that account should
not be historically true. The psychologist may very easily account for
St. Peter's vision by the working in his mind of the liberal teaching
of Stephen, the effect of his fast, and so on. But that does not
prevent us recognizing that vision as an instrument of divine
Revelation. We at the present day do not believe in this fundamental
principle of Christianity because of that dream of St. Peter's; for we
know that dreams are not always truth or always edifying. We believe
in that principle on other grounds--the convincing grounds (among
others) which St. Luke puts into St. Peter's mouth {147} on the
following morning. But that need not prevent our recognizing that God
may have communicated that truth to the men of that generation--and
through them to us--partly by means of that dream.

The two principles then for which I w