In this connection we, on the other hand, use the word reason to include the whole of man's faculty of knowing the truth as it exists at present in his fallen condition, informed by all the lights of his moral, emotional and spiritual nature, by his personal ex- perience, and by all the natural light of the world without, as the works of God and the history of mankind.
8. What are the different positions held by the several classes of Rationalists ?
The term Rationalist and Rationalistic have been used in dif- ferent schools in very different senses. In general, however, it may be said, 1st, that in philosophy that system is rationalistic which, in a greater or less degree, starts from a priori principles constitutional to the human mind, and interprets all experience and history, except in those extreme systems where the validity of experience and history is altogether denied, in subordination to these principles. Thus every philosophical system may be said in some sense to be rationalistic which does not draw all knowl- edge from the bodily senses. But, 2d, in Christian theology that system is properly called rationalistic which either rejects the pos- sibility of a supernatural revelation altogether, or which inter- prets the records of that revelation in subordination to the pre-
42 THEOLOGY AND ITS SOURCES.
viously settled conclusions of the human intellect, or the intuitive sentiments of the human heart. Thus, when any philosophy whatsoever is allowed to modify the interpretation of the Scrip- tures by its own independent principles, the result is a rational- istic system, whether the philosophy so modifying them is itself rationalistic or eminently the reverse. For instance, 1st. The rationalism of Priestly and the old school of English and American Unitarians sprang from interpreting the Scriptures under the rule of the lowest sensational and materialistic philosophy. 2d. The rationalism of the modern Germans and their disciples in England and America springs from subjecting all revelation to the supreme rule of the a priori principles of reason. 3d. The rationalism of the new school of Newman and Parker, self-styled " spiritual," has its source in elevating the natural, moral intuitions and feelings common to all men to the seat of supreme judge.
It will serve a good purpose to group the different classes of rationalists thus.
I. Those who deny the possibility and necessity of a super- natural revelation at all.
(1.) The Pantheists of all schools. They maintain that since God is equally in all things and in all events, all phenomena are consequently equally modifications, and therefore equally revela- tions of him. There is a higher, though not more real sense, in which God reveals himself in man, and most conspicuously in heroic men, so that in a rising scale of revelation, God is in the same sense, though in different degrees, revealed in Plato, Moses, Paul, and Jesus Christ.
(2.) Others, as F. W. Newman, Theodore Parker, etc., and in tendency certainly Mr. Morell, in his " Philosophy of Keligion," maintain that from the very nature of religion the object, and from the constitution of man the subject, of divine knowledge, no religious revelation is possible to man, except through the exer- cise of his natural faculty of spiritual intuition. Newman and Parker maintain that this intuition is sufficient for man in its normal state, and that there is therefore an element of permanent and universal truth common to Christianity and all other relig- ions, while the special history and doctrines of all of them are the mere outward symbols which thinkers of the nineteenth century have outgrown. Morell, on the other hand, admits that in the
SUPERNATURAL REVELATION POSSIBLE. 43
case of the writers of the Christian Scriptures, this natural faculty of spiritual intuition was exalted in a manner very much the same as that which we understand by spiritual illumination, which ac- companies every case of genuine Christian sanctification ; thus the apostles were inspired only in so far as they were preeminently holy and profoundly experienced in divine things.
(3.) Others hold, like the old Deists, that no revelation has been given, because none was needed. Stealing their conceptions of God from revelation, they argue from the sufficiency of the knowledge which natural theology presents that no supernatural revelation is necessary.