ii4 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1868- 



by man before a truly harmonious universe of persons can 

 be constituted. 



Personal fellowship is ever based on personal action 

 and reaction, and so must it be in Christianity. The 

 Christian consciousness of God as our God rests on His 

 historical manifestation of Himself to man, rests, in a 

 word, on a supernatural history. There is more in history 

 than a record of human passions and activities, of human 

 love and hatred, ambition, heroism, or crime. Nor 

 must we think that we explain history, if behind these 

 human forces we see the unconscious workings of an 

 all -pervading world-spirit moulding man s career with 

 benignant but inexorable fatality. It is the personal 

 working of God on man consciously exerted and con 

 sciously responded to that gives history its life and hope. 

 All men s lives indeed are unconsciously moulded by an 

 all-pervading divine providence ; but this could never 

 have sufficed to redeem the world. Man must know that 

 God is dealing with him in person and must willingly 

 submit himself to the divine influence. This it is that 

 constitutes Christianity supernatural. Our Christian 

 faith that God in Christ Jesus has made Himself personally 

 known to us, has entered into personal relations with us, 

 is then in one word our faith in a supernatural self- 

 manifestation of God ; and the apologetic in which we 

 seek to justify our Christian faith must have for its 

 central point this idea of the supernatural. 



Thus in the widest sense all apologetic turns about the 

 personality of God as speculatively true and historically 

 manifested. The strong dislike to this doctrine, taking 

 the double form of deism or pantheism, which runs 

 through modern speculation, is what really forces us into 

 apologetics. If men were as ready a priori to admit a 

 divine personality working in history as to refer the 

 facts of history to human persons as cause, there would 

 be no difficulty in justifying our Christian faith. Not 

 the remoteness or imperfect evidence of the supernatural 



