n8 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1868- 



and declare His will unto His Church.&quot; Divine revelation, 

 then, is a communication of truth from God to man. 

 Only by apprehending this truth is salvation possible, 

 and so, in the words of Rothe, &quot; All religious interests in 

 Christianity seemed finally to converge in the necessity 

 of experiencing with certainty where the religious doctrine 

 promulgated among men by divine revelation is deposited 

 in trustworthy fashion.&quot; 



Such an authoritative statement of saving truth the 

 Protestant churches could seek in Scripture only, and 

 hence the belief in the authority and infallibility of the 

 Bible was necessarily conceived as the indispensable 

 foundation of all other religious convictions. Till this 

 belief is established, no Christianity seemed possible, and 

 so an apologetic was called for which should treat of the 

 possibility, necessity, and criteria of a supernatural 

 communication of truth, and should maintain that these 

 criteria are found in Christianity, and that the truth itself 

 is contained in an infallible book. Only when these 

 results are reached can we on this theory feel that we 

 have our feet on firm ground, and all who cannot go 

 thus far with us must be viewed as consciously or un 

 consciously sapping the very foundations of Christianity. 



This is not the place to dwell in detail on the for 

 midable difficulties and unending toils to which such an 

 apologetic is exposed. The point on which we have to 

 dwell is the position here assigned to the supernatural in 

 Christianity. The supernatural appears on the traditional 

 theory primarily as a supernatural communication of 

 truth. Christianity is necessarily supernatural, because 

 the truth needed for salvation cannot be reached by the 

 natural intellect. It is not to some positive principle in 

 man s nature but to a weakness and deficiency of our 

 faculties that the supernatural in Christianity is due. 

 We must put this proposition side by side with the 

 doctrine that the weakness of human reason is one part 

 of the corruption brought in by sin. Our Protestant 



