CHAPTER II.

THE NECESSITY OF A REVELATION PROVED BY

HISTORY.

UT first we are told by many that a revelation

Bis

unnecessary. Has not God-say theygiven to all men reason and conscience, and does not His spirit work in all hearts, leading them, if they choose, to the knowledge of His will? Has not the spirit of God spoken through Socrates and Plato, as well as Christ? May not even Buddha and Confucius have heard His sacred voice, and proclaimed to the myriads of the East all that they require to know about their Maker? It is a favourite view with many that God has been speaking in all the ages, and manifesting Himself through prophets equal in authority to, or at least as truly inspired as, Jesus Christ. Those who hold this view of course repudiate the exclusive claims of Christianity; their theory is absolutely incom

patible with those in numerable sayings of Christ, in which He demands absolute allegiance from all men, and announces that He, and He only, is the Lord of quick and dead, the only begotten Son, the Saviour of the world. Either Christ had as little right to make these claims as Mahomet, or his real teaching has been so lost amid a cloud of tradition that we can only trace a few faint outlines. It is perfectly clear that this view as to the equality of all re velations, or rather the necessity for none, is equivalent to the rejection of the Christian scheme, and the Bible can never maintain its authority among men if it be allowed that the Koran, or the Vedas, or the Golden Book of Mormon, are to divide with it the honour of being the utterance of God.

But what does history say to this theory of an all-prevading and ever-present manifestation of God? Do we find that in all ages and in all climes the spiritual and moral state of mankind has been steadily advancing? Do we find that a higher civilization has been steadily supplanting the lower, and that mankind in all parts of the world have been coming by consentaneous movement to the recognition of those sublime truths that we

have learned from the Bible? All this we would have a right to expect if God had manifested Himself alike to all people, and in all times. We find just the opposite; we find nowhere a steady advance of humanity, except under the influence of Bible teaching and Christian morality.

In support of this assertion, let us first glance at the religions of the East. We find the Hinduism of modern India a vile and corrupting system, incapable of regenerating mankind, and showing no advance, but a retrogression from the comparative purity of the Vedic hymns; we find even now widow-burning and self-torture sanctioned, nay enjoined, by the Brahminical priesthood; and till Christianity had cast its pure rays on that darkened race, there did not arise among the two hundred millions of India a single teacher who could shake the hoary fabric of superstition. Let us turn to China, and we find another effete religion of nature, perhaps not so noisome in its doctrines as Hinduism, but equally incapable of elevating the moral life of the people, or bringing them into anything like a noble and progressive civilization. It is not our intention here to examine the

doctrinal systems of heathendom, but to judge them by their fruits, and so we will not refer to the systems of Buddha and Confucius, the so-called prophets of China, beyond saying that, except some dry moral aphorisms, they supply no food for the spiritual wants of man, and that China has remained some three thousand years or more, that is, as far back as history extends, in the same torpid corrupt state of civilization it now exhibits. Materialism is its faith, the future has no hopes or no terrors, and a practical atheism broods over that vast section of mankind; nor will it ever be dispelled till the light of Christ shines into the dark void. We are not unaware that certain lofty and true utterances are ascribed to Brahma and Buddha and the Sikh Gooroos. Those legendary characters have a nimbus of radiance around them, which attracts the reverential gaze of the student of antiquity, and certainly there have come down to us sayings ascribed to them which indicate truer views of goodness than their modern expounders possess. We do not deny that among heathen philosophers some attained loftier moral heights than others; nay, we admit that in some sense, by

acting up to the light of nature, they received a degree of divine light into their souls. But we hold that neither Brahma, nor Buddha, nor Socrates, nor Plato, received in any proper sense a revelation, that is an authoritative declaration from God of His will respecting men. They received no such revelation as Abraham or Moses, nor are they to be named in the same breath with Him to whom Moses and the Prophets bare witness, and who was either the eternal and only begotten Son of God, or the greatest self-deceiver that ever trod the earth.

But Greece and Rome may be cited as more favourable examples of the abiding manifestation of the Divine presence. Their civilisation once shone with a brilliant light, and still draws the admiring gaze of all cultivated minds. Surely, if ever there was an opportunity for man to do without an outward revelation from God, it was in the heydays of Greece, when such a galaxy of genius adorned the world as has never bcen surpassed in after-times. If human philosophy could regenerate mankind, surely the country of Plato and Socrates, of Aristotle and Pythagoras, would become a model of virtue. And we do not