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The One Authentic Voice.
1. The first truth which the author of this Epistle emphasizes is that God has spoken. God has been speaking to our world. Human nature has suffered many degradations, but it has never utterly lost the capacity for seeing the presence and hearing the voice of the Father in heaven. And to that capacity — abused, degraded, but never quite destroyed — God has ever been making His appeal. Now He has flashed forth His glory in the pomp of the sunset, and made the majesty of silent stars to speak His greatness. Now He has called forth, from a solitude which none could penetrate, a holy man into whose very spirit He has inwrought His mind and heart, and has set him to utter His thought and manifest His name. And now He has wrought in the very eyes of the people, vindicating the right and crushing the wrong, making paths through trackless wastes and solid walls of mobile waters, lifting a veil here and speaking a tone there. But everywhere and at all times and in all ways it has been the same God, revealing His life, declaring His will, manifesting His glory, calling to His children. The light was ever adapted to the eye, the revelation to the capacity, the ideal to the spirit. Bit by bit the veil has been lifted, the disclosure made, the glory flashed out, that men might be prepared for the complete vision, the final discovery, the full manifestatioa
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^ I think I ought to tell you that of late the consciousness of the necessity and reliability of revelation has greatly deepened within me. I hardly know how best to convey to others what I mean. Perhaps the best way of putting it would be to say that, although one has always believed in revelation, as every Christian must, it is only comparatively recently that the realization of its outstanding importance has broken upon my mind. You all know how, as children, we take home for granted, as it were ; we observe that our elders come and go, possess a certain authority over us, and appear to be concerned with matters too great for our young apprehension; but, being children, we do not realize that the home itself is maintained by what is brought into it from an outside world by the labours and sacrifices of the bread- winner. We may know it, may often have been told it, may be very grateful for it at special times when it takes forms ex- ceptionally agreeable to our childish intelligence ; but it is only as we grow older that we really come to understand it. To some the knowledge comes gradually and simply ; to others suddenly and painfully. But, in whatever way it comes, it changes one's whole perspective of life in greater or less degree. Of course, I am not suggesting that my religious experience has been as pro- foundly affected as this by the realization to which I refer ; it has not ; but you will all readily admit that to see an essential thing plainly, which before you took for granted, but only saw dimly, must make considerable difference to the way in which you visualize your experience. What I see, then, is this : that at intervals throughout all human history God has been disclosing Himself to His children in exceptional ways over and above all that unaided human faculty could discover for itself ; that flashes and intimations have come through to the natural from the super- natural world, to the temporal from the eternal ; and that in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ especially we have a Divine self- impartation to man such as cannot be explained in terms of our earthly knowledge, and yet is the most precious thing we possess. This does not sound much to say, but there is more in it than appears. Once admit it and it will carry you far. There is no greater question before us at the present hour than the question of the nature, limits, and trustworthiness of Divine revelation.^
2. The voice of God is its own witness. There is something in the voice of God which, to an uncorrupt mind, in proportion as it is uncorrupt, is unmistakable. The words of Amos evidently express the main reason why the voices of God in the Bible
^ R. J. Campbell, in The Christicm CommonKxaUh, April 9, 1913, p. 489.
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demand belief and submission. " The lion hath roared, who will not fear ? the Lord God hath spoken, who can but prophesy ? " If a man's heart be not hardened, the word of God, the voice of God will bespeak the awful Being from whom it proceeds, just as our voices may betray our characters, or as the lion's roar bespeaks a mighty force. Dryden has, to some extent, expressed this in the following lines : —
Majestic and Divine, It speaks no less than God in every line, Commanding words, whose force is still the same As the first fiat that produced our frame.
•[[ Some time ago I was one of a small party which was engaged in exploring some curious winding caves under the guidance of a person well acquainted with their formation. Each of us carried a candle, which was the only hght we had, and at some points during our subterranean progress the illumination produced by the reflection of the rays of our candles from the rock crystals and stalactites above and around us was strikingly beautiful. All at once I noticed another party some distance ahead of us and coming toward us, and as the persons composing it passed one by one under a certain spot we could see their faces plainly. A full, soft light fell upon them from somewhere above. It was a light quite different from that of the candles they carried, and if I had never seen the upper world before, if I had known nothing about it except by hearsay, I should instantly have felt convinced there was such a place because of that light, for it was the light of the sun itself. In like manner I feel convinced that the spiritual, the eternal, the Divine, the home of our souls, is at least what I have described because of the light which breaks through from it, the light that is other and brighter than the candle of reason, the light that never was on sea or land, but which we can see shining on the faces of the saints.^