8 



ANNUAL ADDRESS. 



as were injurious to man himself. But it remains an essential 

 factor of his being. Man is akin to God ; he aspires to 

 spiritual knowledge and felicity, and his religious history in all 

 the ages is one long effort to attain the satisfaction of his 

 spiritual nature. 



3. There is no other means of satisfying man's spirituality 

 than by revelation. All mere secular truth he may slowly but 

 surely discover for himself. But the truths of God's behig and 

 character, of Jieaven and hell, of immortality, of eternal life, he 

 can learn, if he learns them at all, only by direct communication 

 from God. These truths and others like them, vitally important 

 as they are to him, he cannot know unless God himself reveals 

 them. 



Assuming, then, the existence of a beneficent Deity, I 

 perceive no intrinsic difficulty in revelation. Eather it seems 

 to me to be such a communication as I should expect God to 

 make to man for human good ; and with all my heart I believe 

 that God has " at sundry times and in divers manners " 

 revealed Himself through chosen agents to humanity. 



All that I propose to do in this paper is to enquire how man, 

 by using his own natural powers, was disposed to apprehend 

 and embrace the revelation which it was God's will to make. 



When man began to think at all, he began by thinking about 

 himself. He was chiefly concerned with himself, chiefly inter- 

 ested in himself ; it was only natural that he should judge every- 

 body and everything outside himself by his own nature. The 

 old saying, "AvdpcoTrof; fierpov iravTwv contains a deep psycho- 

 logical truth. Man cannot escape from himself. Consciously 

 or unconsciously he refers all phenomena to himself. Even 

 his deities, as Aristotle* has observed, he creates in his own 

 image. 



But as soon as man reflected, in however a rudimentary manner, 

 upon himself, he became conscious of a dualism in Ids own nature. 

 To say that in early times he conceived himself, intelligently 

 and scientifically, as a being composed of two distinct elements, 



* SiaTTfp KUL T(i (l8t] faiTols d<PofjiOU)VOiu 01 civO pconov.) otrco fcai tovs /St'ovy tcoj/ 

 OfSiv, Polit, i, 2, 7. 



