children come to utter words: by
hearing their parent speak. It is the deaf who are also dumb. God speaks
first, and prayer answers as well as asks. Men reveal themselves to the
God Who has revealed Himself to them.

The Apostle is, however, silent about the revelations of God in nature
and in conscience. He passes them by because we, sinful men, have lost
the key to the language of creation and of our own moral nature. We know
that He speaks through them, but we do not know what He says. If we were
holy, it would be otherwise. All nature would be vocal, "like some
sweet beguiling melody." But to us the universe is a hieroglyphic which
we cannot decipher, until we discover in another revelation the key that
will make all plain.

More strange than this is the Apostle's omission to speak of the Mosaic
dispensation as a revelation of God. We should have expected the verse
to run on this wise: "God, having spoken unto the fathers in the
sacrifices and in the prophets, institutions, and inspired words," etc.
But the author says nothing about rites, institutions, dispensations,
and laws. The reason apparently is that he wishes to compare with the
revelation in Christ the highest, purest, and fullest revelation given
before; and the most complete revelation vouchsafed to men, before the
Son came to declare the Father, is to be found, not in sacrifices, but
in the words of promise, not in the institutions, but in holy men, who
were sent, time after time, to quicken the institutions into new life or
to preach new truths. The prophets were seers and poets. Nature's
highest gift is imagination, whether it "makes" a world that transcends
nature or "sees" what in nature is hidden from the eyes of ordinary men.
This faculty of the true poet, elevated, purified, taken possession of
by God's Holy Spirit, became the best instrument of revelation, until
the word of prophecy was made more sure through the still better gift of
the Son.

But it would appear from the Apostle's language that even the lamp of
prophecy, shining in a dark place, was in two respects defective. "God
spake in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners." He
spake in divers portions; that is, the revelation was broken, as the
light was scattered before it was gathered into one source. Again, He
spake in divers manners. Not only the revelation was fragmentary, but
the separate portions were not of the same kind. The two defects were
that the revelation