i8 7 o] CHRISTIANITY AND SUPERNATURAL 127 



peculiar providence, is not essentially different from the 

 ordinary revelation of God in nature, which on the 

 fundamental Christian antithesis of sin and grace has 

 shown itself to us to be quite insufficient, revealing only 

 what we may call the natural, not the personal, side of 

 God. 



We may conceive the natural providence of God as 

 so adjusted that mankind once possessing a true con 

 sciousness of God would always see Him as personally 

 active in the world ; but what revelation has to supply 

 is precisely the want of such a consciousness. The 

 process by which we find God in nature is always more 

 or less a ratiocinative one ; so that in this way the 

 knowledge of God as our Redeemer would be a deduction 

 from our experience of the benefits of redemption. But 

 this, as our whole argument shows and an appeal to the 

 Christian consciousness will confirm, is a precise reversal 

 of the true state of the matter. The first step in re 

 demption is revelation, if the first step in salvation is 

 personal faith. The divine revelation must be primarily 

 an immediate manifestation of God ; a manifestation of 

 God in events that are at once seen to form no part of 

 the chain of nature but to be directly personal and 

 explicable only as acts of God. If any step whatever 

 must be intercalated in tracing the manifestation up to 

 God the sinful intellect can still stop short with this 

 natural explanation, and has no new necessity laid upon 

 it of ascending to a higher cause. In a word, God s 

 supernatural manifestation of Himself in redemption is 

 miraculous, breaking through the natural course of 

 the universe. We do not in saying this deny the reality 

 and necessity of a natural manifestation of God ; but 

 we say that such a manifestation is valuable only as 

 subsidiary to a miraculous and immediate manifestation. 



Deny this and it is still possible to maintain that in 

 Christianity man enters into personal fellowship with 

 God; but the realising of this fellowship appears no 



