158 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1868- 



which operating in our hearts produces a consciousness 

 in the first instance indeed subjective, but capable of being 

 developed into true knowledge of the revealing God. 



It is, indeed, true that this explanation would be in 

 adequate on the old idea of revelation as a body of truth 

 received on the testimony not of a human witness but of 

 God ; for truth received on testimony is either not under 

 stood at all or at once grasped in its full objectivity. 

 But the truth that has a saving power is truth experienced. 

 It is an experimental knowledge of God Himself in Christ, 

 an experimental knowledge of sin and salvation, that must 

 be the content of Christian theology. 



A mere dictation from on high of truths about God 

 and man would be revelation in a heathen, not in a 

 Christian sense. 



The true idea of revelation is such an activity of God 

 among and towards men as shall enable man to apprehend 

 God in His holiness, justice, and redemptive love, just by 

 the same kind of experience as enables us to know our 

 fellow-men. It is the record of such a revelation that 

 lies before us in Holy Scripture. For there we read how 

 God from the earliest time dealt personally with mankind 

 in a supernatural history culminating in the incarnation, 

 death, and resurrection of our Lord, and how, from age 

 to age, the Church of God was able to lay hold on the 

 divine person thus manifested, by faith unto salvation. 

 Christ Himself appears in this history as the full manifesta 

 tion of God. He is the Word of God, i.e. revelation is 

 a word not in the sense of a truth dictated by God but as 

 the living expression of the inmost heart of the speaker. 



Let us look for a moment at the way in which the 

 historical personality of Christ influenced those that were 

 brought face to face with Him. We know from the Gospel 

 history, especially from that Gospel which is the direct 

 record of an apostle s experience, that the bond which 

 knit the faithful disciples to their Master was not in the 

 first instance a distinct conception of the Godhead im- 



