nuously insisted on in the Old
Testament, is no less insisted on in the New. But the mysterious
complexity embraced within that unity, though darkly hinted at in the
older teaching, is nowhere clearly set forth, but in the latter. We may
find anticipations of the teaching of St. Paul and St. John, and of our
Lord Himself as recorded by St. John, in the Book of Proverbs, in the
Prophets, in the Rabbinical writers between the Prophets and the New
Testament, and we can see in Philo to what this finally came unaided by
Revelation. But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature and on the
Incarnation is distinct from all this. And it is in the Christian form,
and only in that form, that the doctrine has satisfied the spiritual
needs of the great mass of believers.

Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold which this teaching has had
upon mankind has depended entirely on the extraordinary degree in which
the teaching of the Bible has satisfied the conscience. Without that no
miracles however overwhelmingly attested, no external evidence of
whatever kind, could have compelled intellects of the highest rank, side
by side with the most uncultivated and the most barren, to accept it as
divine, nor could anything else have so often rekindled its old fire at
times when faith in it had apparently withered away. The teaching of
the Bible has always found and must always find its main evidence within
the human soul.

And the fact that the teaching of the Bible, though when examined
afterwards it turns out to be development or evolution, yet was always
given at the time as a revelation, so far from diminishing the force of
this internal evidence adds to it still more force than it would
otherwise have. For what underlies the very conception of revelation is
the doctrine that all progress in higher spiritual knowledge is bound up
with conscious communion with God. Now it is an experience common to all
believers that in that communion is to be found not only all strength
but all enlightenment also. The believer knows that he learns spiritual
truth in proportion as he refers his life to God's judgment, prays to
God for clearer vision of what is duty and what is right faith, and
makes it his one great aim to do God's will. He uses all the faculties
that God has given him to understand the great divine law; but he
perpetually looks to God for instruction, and whatever else may be said
of that instruction his experience tells him that h