dered
at, then, if, in the teaching of Socrates and Plato, we should find a
striking _harmony_ of sentiment, and even form of expression, with some
parts of the Christian revelation. No short-sighted jealousy ought to
impugn the honesty of our judgment, if, in the speculations of Plato, we
catch glimpses of a world of ideas not unlike that which Christianity
discloses, and hear words not unfamiliar to those who spake as they were
moved by the Holy Ghost.

If, then, there exists some correlation between Divine and human reason,
and if the light which illuminates all minds in Christian and in heathen
lands is the _same_ "true light," though differing in degrees of
brightness, it is most natural and reasonable to expect some connection
and some correspondence between the discoveries of philosophy and the
revelations of the Sacred Oracles.

Although Christianity is confessedly something which is above reason and
nature--something communicated from above, and therefore in the fullest
sense supernatural and superhuman, yet it must stand in _relation_ to
reason and nature, and to their historic development; otherwise it could
not operate on man at all. "We have no knowledge of a dynamic influence,
spiritual or natural, without a dynamic reaction." Matter can only be
moved by forces, and according to laws, as it has properties which
correlate it with these forces and laws. And mind can not be determined
from without to any specific form of cognition, unless it have powers of
apprehension and conception which are governed by uniform laws. If man
is to be instructed by a verbal revelation, he must, at least, be
capacitated for the reception of divine communication--must have a power
of forming supersensuous conceptions, and there must be some original
community of thought and idea between the mind that teaches and the mind
that is taught. A revelation from an invisible God--a being "whom no man
has ever seen or ever can see" with the eye of sense--would have no
affinity for, and no power to affect and enlighten, a being who had no
presentiment of an invisible Power to which he is in some way related. A
revealed law promulgated from an unseen and utterly unknown Power would
have no constraining authority, if man had no idea of right, no sense of
duty, no feeling of obligation to a Supreme Being. If, therefore,
religious instruction be not already preceded by an innate consciousness
of God, and of obligation to God, as an operativ