ome known and reverenced,
some quite unnoticed. It has leavened all literature and all
legislation. It has changed the customs of mankind and is still changing
them. And if it be replied that all this is nothing but one form of the
development of humanity and shows no proof of a Divine Ruler, we have a
right to ask what then could be the source of such a development, and
how is it that so great a power should always have worked in the name of
God and should have always referred everything to His command? That
fanaticism should plead God's authority without any right to do so is
intelligible. But is it intelligible that all this truth and justice and
purity and self-sacrificing love, all this obedience to the Supreme Law,
should be the fruit of believing a lie? If there be a God, it is to be
expected that He would communicate with His creatures if those creatures
were capable of receiving the communication; and if He did communicate
with His creatures it is to be expected that His communication would be
such as we find in the Bible. The purpose of the Bible, the form of it,
the gradual formation of it, the steadily-growing Revelation contained
in it, these harmonise with the moral law revealed originally in the
conscience. And the effect which the Revelation has produced on human
history is real and great. The power which God's Revelation has exerted
on the world is an undeniable fact among phenomena. It is not a
demonstration of His existence; but it is a full answer to those who
say, 'If God made and rules the world why do we find no signs of His
hand in its course?'

And thirdly, this Revelation has not merely taken the form of a message
or a series of messages, but has culminated in the appearance of a
person who has always satisfied and still satisfies the conception
formed by our spiritual faculty of a human representation of the divine
law. Our Lord's life is that law translated into human action, and all
the more because human faculties had not first framed the conception
which He then came to fulfil, but He exhibited the ideal, and our
conception rose as it were to correspond to it. And, as He includes in
Himself all the teaching, so does He give from Himself all the power of
the Revelation which He came to crown. And every true disciple of Christ
can bear witness to the reality of that power in sustaining the soul.

Thus has the God, whom our spiritual faculty commands us to worship and
to reverence, shown Him