l, it is in virtue of his having some
reason that man is the subject of revelation. He is continually asked to
exercise his reason upon certain parts of the revelation, even by those
who maintain that he must do so only within limits. It is only because
there in a certain reasonableness in the conceptions of revealed
religion that man has ever been able to make them his own or to find in
them meaning and edification. This external relation of reason to
revelation cannot continue. Nor can the encroachments of reason be met
by temporary distinctions such as that between the natural and the
supernatural. The antithesis to the natural is not the supernatural, but
the unnatural. The antithesis to reason is not faith, but irrationality.
The antithesis to human truth is not the divine truth. It is falsehood.

[Footnote 4: Seth Pringle-Pattison, _The Philosophical Radicals_, p.
216.]

When men have made this discovery, a revulsion carries their minds to
the second position of which we spoke. This is, namely, the position of
extreme denial. It is an attitude of negation toward revelation, such as
prevailed in the barren and trivial rationalism of the end of the
eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges
itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive
religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of
deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion
of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely
the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is
that it is merely the current morality plus certain unprovable
assumptions. Indeed, they may think it to be but the obstinate adherence
to these assumptions minus the current morality. It is impossible that
this shallow view should prevail. To overcome it, however, there is need
of a philosophy which shall give not less, but greater scope to reason
and at the same time an inward meaning to revelation.

This brings us to the third possible position, to which the best
thinkers of the nineteenth century have advanced. So long as deistic
views of the relation of God to man and the world held the field,
revelation meant something interjected _ab extra_ into the established
order of things. The popular theology which so abhorred deism was yet
essentially deistic in its notion of God and of his separation from the
world. Men did not perceive that by thus separating