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1. Needs of man's nature. Man's intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.

A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.

(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs: “Renown is loud,” he says, “and not to lose one's senses is God's greatest gift. … The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.” Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil. … To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance. … If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world.”

(b) Versus Socrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.”W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths: “Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man's natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.” Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.”Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.” See also Flint, Theism, 305.

(c) Versus Thomas Paine: “Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.” Plato, Laws, 9:854, c, for substance: “Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.” Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.” Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered “until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.” Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says: “Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comes to men, yes, into men.” We are sinful, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; … it demands the influence of personality; … the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.” In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.

B. Historical proof.—(a) The knowledge of moral and religious truth possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is grossly and increasingly imperfect. (b) Man's actual condition in ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme moral depravity. (c) With this depravity is found a general conviction of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after, and hope of, aid from above.

Pythagoras: “It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.” Socrates: “Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.” Plato: “We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.” Disciple of Plato: “Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.” Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for “a more sure word of prophecy” (2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156–172, 335–338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.

2. Presumption of supply. What we know of God, by nature, affords ground for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We argue this:

(a) From our necessary conviction of God's wisdom. Having made man a spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish the means needed to secure these ends. (b) From the actual, though incomplete, revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish the work he has begun. (c) From the general connection of want and supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the highest want will be all the more surely met. (d) From analogies of nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.

(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan's escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and “danced for joy upon the brig o' Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan's influence, he came also to believe that “God meant that we should know him.” In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother's heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother's sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God's distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man's being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.

(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.” (c) R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.” (d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch's treatise “De Sera Numinis Vindicta” is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just. “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,” is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.

The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; see Job 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?” 24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?” The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God's goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. Compare Acts 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”; 17:25–27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men … that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”; Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”; 3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”; Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”; 2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.” See Hackett's edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462–487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.

We conclude this section upon the reasons a priori for expecting a revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that, while conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not, from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God's own voice, assuring him of “redemption … the forgiveness of … trespasses” (Eph. 1:7) and revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered possible.

Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says: “Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.” We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God's goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God's holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren: “Does God's love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”