CHAPTER IV. NECESSITY OF A DIVINE REVELATION. Our brief examination of man's mental and moral constitution has shown that he ranks not only as an intellectual subject, but as a religious being as well, by his possession of moral faculties and an innate disposition impelling him to worship. Our object in the present chapter is to show that he does not possess the means of effecting his own moral regeneration and that hence there is necessity of a divine revelation. To state the subject differently, we propose to make clear this important fact: that subjective truth is not sufficient to secure redemption from his fallen condition in sin. It is maintained by some that sufficient light is revealed subjectively in the human consciousness and that therefore there is no need of an objective revelation; that is, a revelation made to him. Now, in the first place, we observe that if sufficient light had always shone in the inner consciousness to guide man's feet in the pathway of peace to the goal of righteousness, then we might, it seems, be able to discover some such fruits of its workings. But in all the recorded history of the human race we find no such results. Sinful man, left to himself, has ever gravitated downwards to moral, so cial, and political ruin. Others maintain that the revelation which God has made of himself in nature is sufficient to elevate mankind, but the same test that we have applied to subjective revelation convinces us otherwise. "Undoubtedly the works of the Almighty influence wonderfully the human mind. They exalt, overawe, delight, and expand the soul; they sometimes hush to silence, or awaken praise, create ennobling images or kindle poetic fires; but it is exceedingly questionable whether they ever do more than render active what is already latent in the man. But be that as it may, though nature may quicken the muse of the poet and the genius of the artist, and although it may at times stimulate devotion, it is practically powerless to reclaim the wanderer from right, to purify the heart of the vicious, or to restore hope to the despairing. "The sun that rolls resplendently in space, whose brightness is the shadow of its Creator's glory, subtle and penetrating though its light may be, invading chambers of densest ignorance and inundating dens of vice, never yet has flooded the benighted intellect with healing radiance or quickened into moral fruitfulness the barren conscience. The humblest roadside preacher in his poverty has made more converts to virtue's cause than has the king of day in all the fulness of his insufferable splendor. Ocean in its vastness-a world of water rising in mists and ascending in waves to salute a world of fire-awakens not with the thunder of its rolling billows the penitence of the prodigal; and neither does its majestic and appalling power rescue the dissolute and depraved. The sweet saintly life of a Christian mother has done more to save the sea-boy from eternal ruin than all the mighty headstrong waters that swirl in tempests or sleep in calms. They who dwell among the mountains, who inhabit solemn solitudes, who gaze on the untrodden snows of altitudes beyond their reach, and who are familiar with the antheming winds as they traverse the pine forests whose roots cling to inhospitable rocks, are no better, no purer, than they who tread the muddy streets and gaze continually on the blank, monotonous houses of great cities. "The poorest mission in the most squalid quarter of a dense metropolis will do more real work in a year for virtue and piety than the beauty of Chamounix or the savage grandeur of the Engadine will accomplish in an age. Morally, the Sundayschool children of a country are worth more than all the stars that shine in heaven or all the flowers that gleam on earth, and in things pertaining to re |