As was shown in the preceding chapter, religious faith is most reasonable. This reasonableness, however, depends upon two conditions, namely, the existence of God and the fact of supernatural revelation. Now, that God exists, is a necessary inference of what has already been said on the subject of Creation.{1} Besides it hardly need be proved, since it is only "the fool who saith in his heart that there is no God." But it is otherwise with supernatural revelation. Many persons of undoubtedly sound mind, not only deny the fact of supernatural revelation, but even call in question its possibility. Hence in the present chapter we shall endeavor to show that supernatural revelation is most certainly possible, reserving the question of fact for a subsequent discussion.
Revelation, in its verbal significance, means the drawing back of a veil that hides something from view, and as applied to intellectual cognition, it signifies the manifestation of some fact or truth that was before unknown. Thus we speak, in ordinary parlance, of revealing secrets, that is, of disclosing something that was hidden from the person to whom the secret is made known. Hence when we say that God can reveal, we mean that He can make known to us truths of which we are not cognizant; and the knowledge thus imparted, as well as the act of imparting it, is called revelation.
This revelation, as made by God, may be either natural or supernatural. It is natural, when God communicates knowledge to us in virtue of the creative act, and in a way that accords with the ordinary laws which govern the operations of our cognoscitive faculties; it is supernatural, when the knowledge imparted proceeds from a special act of God, distinct from that of creation, and is received by us in a manner that supersedes the ordinary laws of mental perception.
The difference between these two kinds of revelation may perhaps be made clear by means of an example. Thus in the case of the young, the natural way of acquiring knowledge consists in passing through the various exercises of the class-room. There the teacher assigns them lessons, shows them how to go about their studies, explains to them the difficulties which occur, and makes them repeat his own explanations, until their minds understand and retain at least a part of what was presented to them in successive instructions. The process may be slow and laborious, but it serves its purpose. Little by little the elements of learning are mastered, the mind is strengthened by systematic exercise, new knowledge is continually acquired, and if the work be carried on long enough, a finished intellectual education will be the final result. This may be called the natural way of acquiring knowledge; because it is accommodated to the pupils' natural powers. By a proper use of their eyes and ears, and by due application of their intellect and will, they accomplish that for which nature has given them an aptitude. Consequently, the knowledge which they thus acquire is, as far as its acquisition is concerned, altogether natural in character and if, moreover, it extends itself only to such truths as may be gathered from a study of nature, it is ultimately identical with natural revelation. But now suppose that God Himself were to take the part of the teacher, and instead of making the pupils go through the laborious process of training just described, He were to enlighten their young minds in such a way as to enable them to acquire in an instant all the knowledge ever possessed by the world's greatest sages and most eminent divines; a knowledge not only of the mysteries of nature, but also of the hidden things of nature's God: in that case we would have an instance of supernatural revelation. For first of all, the instantaneous acquisition of deep and extensive knowledge is beyond man's natural powers, even though the knowledge in question be such as might be obtained by a study of merely natural phenomena. Secondly, a knowledge of the hidden things of God, that is, of mysteries which appertain to God's inner life, is under all circumstances beyond the reach of man's unaided reason. Consequently, in the example given, there is question of a knowledge which is above man's nature, and which is acquired in a way for which nature, left to itself, has no aptitude; hence it is, in the true sense of the word, a supernatural knowledge, or, if viewed as proceeding from God, a supernatural revelation. In general, therefore, natural revelation is that knowledge for the acquisition of which nature has provided; whilst supernat-ural revelation is a knowledge that must come directly from God.
Now, that natural revelation is possible, can in no wise be doubted; because a mere glance at the world around us reveals a host of truths concerning God and man and the relations which exist between the two. Thus reason tells us that the world must have been called into existence by a creative act, and that, therefore, there must be a Creator, on whom all things, we ourselves included, absolutely depend. It tells us that this Creator, because of His intrinsic excellence, must be loved and revered and praised, and, because of His sovereign authority, must be obeyed in all things. Nay, reason points even to a life beyond the grave, where virtue shall be rewarded and vice shall be punished; where man shall forever be happy or miserable according as his life has been in keeping with God's law or has been opposed to the same. All this we can learn from the world and the creatures which it contains; yet the world, and all that is in the world, is but a visible manifestation of God's infinite perfections; it is His sign-language by means of which He communicates with His reasonable creatures. The message which the visible universe holds for us is God's own message to man; it is His natural revelation. Hence natural revelation is most certainly possible; because it is an accomplished and universally recog-nized fact, and a fact necessarily presupposes its own possibility.
From the possibility of natural revelation it is, indeed, a far cry to the possibility of a revelation that is altogether supernatural in character, yet if we admit the former, then there is no reason in the world why we should reject the latter. In regard to this point we must bear in mind two facts, which are often overlooked, though they shed much light upon the matter in hand. The first fact is, that the same God, Who is said to be the author of supernatural revelation, is also the author of man's nature, and therefore the source whence the laws that govern man's actions take their rise. This in itself would be sufficient to show that supernatural revelation is possible. For if God made man, can we suppose that He made Him in such a way as to make direct communication with him impossible? Is that the way a loving and prudent father would act with regard to his children? Yet God is truly a most loving Father, and of His wisdom and power there is no end. Hence is it not likely that He fashioned man's intellect and will in a manner that would enable Him to act upon them whenever and whatever way He might see fit? To have done otherwise would have been unworthy both of His wisdom and goodness. As He made the human intellect and will, so also did He enact the laws according to which both must act; and there fore the execution of these laws necessarily depends on His sovereign will. The laws which He freely established, He can freely suspend, whenever such a suspension serves a useful purpose. In fact, does not every human lawgiver act in precisely the same manner? Whenever a prudent legislator enacts a law, he reserves to himself the right, and in the very nature of things he is possessed of the power, to interfere with that law for any good reason which may occur in course of time. The opponents of supernatural revelation overlook this plain fact altogether, and as a result they foolishly deny God a power which they concede to man.
The second fact, which is often overlooked, is, that human nature instinctively craves for a supernatural revelation. This is evident to any one who knows his own heart, and who understands the lesson taught by the history of the human race. The knowledge which we gather from God's works is very limited, and necessarily leaves the mind unsatisfied. We ever desire to know more about God; we are borne onward with an irresistible craving to find out something concerning His inmost being; something about His thoughts, His affections, and the intentions which He has regarding our future destiny; yet touching these various points, nature either speaks obscurely, or is completely dumb. Hence from nature we look up to nature's God, expecting Him to open the sealed book, and read unto us the message contained therein.
It is for this reason that the various religions of the past, false though they might be, purported to include some sort of special revelation as an essential element. A purely natural religion, a religion, namely, that is based upon a merely intellectual contemplation of nature, is indeed possible; yet it has never existed in the historical past. Every religious system, of which we have any knowledge, is ultimately founded upon a special message of God to man. Human nature seems to recognize instinctively that in a matter so divine, as religion necessarily is, God Himself must be its teacher.
Now this attitude of the human mind and heart towards a special message from God admits of but one reasonable explanation, namely, that God so constituted human nature as to make supernatural revelation possible. It is true, indeed, that the craving for greater knowledge of God than may be attained by natural means is not so irresistible as to prove the necessity of supernatural revelation; nevertheless, its universal presence in the hearts of men, who have not made themselves slaves to things of earth, would seem to place the possibility of said revelation beyond all doubt. For any universal desire, that arises independently of extrinsic conditions, must in some manner be founded in nature, and nature does not lead men to desire that which is absolutely impossible. Hence if we take human nature as it comes in touch with our own experience, and as it stands revealed in the light of history, there appears a strong presumption in favor of supernatural revelation, if not as an actual fact, at least as a theoretical possibility.
Nor is there aught in the concept of supernatural revelation that can invalidate this antecedent probability. For if God can "whisper to us through the medium of external nature, and speak to us through the dictates of our conscience," why should He not be able to hold personal intercourse with our souls by directly enlightening our understanding? God is a spirit, and so also are our souls spirits, and there can certainly be no repugnance in any direct communication between spirit and spirit. It is true, our souls are at present so intimately united to our bodies that the two form but one being, yet in that union the soul does not lose its spirituality: for its intellectual operations it is only extrinsically dependent on the body, that is, in so far as the senses must supply it with the proper objects upon which it can exercise its spiritual activity. Now these objects God Himself can supply; for what He can do by means of secondary causes He can do by Himself, except where there is question of a vital act. As He can determine the intellect through the operation of created objects upon man's senses, so can He also determine it by His own immediate action, because in either case the act of knowing proceeds from its own proper faculty. Hence as we can infer many truths concerning God and our relations to Him by contemplating and reasoning upon the objects that present themselves to our senses, so can we also arrive at a knowledge of these and similar truths through a direct enlightenment of our understanding, determined by the immediate action of God upon our intellect, and the knowledge thus acquired is supernatural revelation, as is also the act of imparting it as far as it proceeds from God.
What makes it all the more surprising that there should be, at the present time, so strong a sentiment against this direct communication between God and man, is the fact that there is observable a rapidly growing belief in the immediate action of soul upon soul. It has become quite the fashion to believe in telepathy, mind-reading, and thought-transference; yet all these different phenomena, as commonly understood, imply a direct communication between spirit and spirit. And if men admit that created spirits can act upon one another without the mediation of the senses, are they not glaringly inconsistent when they at the same time deny the possibility of such action between God and the human soul? I do not say that there is any truth in telepathy or thought-transference, as commonly understood, but that does not weaken the force of my argument. The fact that men believe in these phenomena puts upon th.em the logical necessity of admitting the possibility of supernatural revelation, at least in so far as it consists in the immediate action of God upon the human intellect.
Again, as God can act directly upon the intellect, so can He also act upon the senses, even though they be material in their nature; because it was His own omnipotent power that called these senses into being, and it belongs to Him to prescribe their mode of action. Hence He can make special revelations, not only by spiritual enlightenment, but also by sensible representations and visions, as was frequently done in the case of the Prophets of old. Thus we read in the second chapter of Daniel, how God by means of a statue, the different parts of which were made of different material, showed the Babylonian king what empires were to follow his own until the coming of the Messiah, and how they were all to be supplanted by the universal kingdom of Christ.{2} Of the same nature was the vision of St. Peter at Joppa, where he beheld let down from heaven a large vessel wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts, and creeping things of the earth, and fowls of the air, and he was given to understand that henceforth all distinction between Jew and Gentile was abolished, and that one and all were to be received into the Church established by the Saviour of mankind.{3} In such visions, God acts upon the senses even as corporeal objects would do, were they really present; and whilst He thus pictures to the eye or the imagination a symbolical representation of the truth to be conveyed, He at the same time enlightens the understanding of the person to whom the vision is vouchsafed, so that he may read aright the sacred message contained there in. In these and other special ways, therefore, may God impart knowledge to mankind, even as He communicates the same through the creatures which He has called into being by the creative act.
That there is no intrinsic repugnance in such special communications of knowledge on the part of God, the opponents of revelation are thus forced to concede; but they contend that this concession is of little avail, since there is an insuperable difficulty on the part of man, in as much as the person to whom such knowledge is communicated can never be certain whether it is a true revelation or a mere delusion. At first sight there seems to be considerable force in this objection, for it is a noted fact that the human mind is not rarely subject to all sorts of hallucinations; yet a little consideration will readily show that this difficulty is by no means so formidable as it would appear. For, first of all, we must bear in mind that the human intellect is subject to God, so that as He has the power to communicate knowledge, so has He also the power of making the intellect certain whence that knowledge comes. Even as in the natural order there are certain principles which contain within themselves the evidence of their own truth, so also in the supernatural order God can present truths in such a way that their mere presence excludes all possibility of deception. To deny this, would be to take away from God the supreme dominion which He must necessarily have over all His creatures.
However, were we for argument's sake to concede that the person to whom God vouchsafes a special revelation can never be certain whence it proceeds, this would in no wise interfere with the possibility of supernatural revelation. For God need not reveal supernatural truths to each single individual, but He may select a few, whom He commissions to announce His message to the rest of mankind, and the truths so announced He can confirm by such visible signs as are calculated to remove all doubts regarding their origin. To illustrate my meaning by a concrete example: Let us suppose that God made known to me by special revelation the day of the last judgment, that is, the exact number of years yet to elapse before said judgment would take place. Perhaps I might have my doubts concerning the revelation in question, and if I were to inform you of this same revelation, you certainly would have your doubts. But if, urged on by the Spirit of God, I were to lead you to a place where a person had been buried months ago, and there, opening the grave and exhibiting to your view a corpse almost completely decomposed, I were to promise that in token of the truth of my statement I would restore the dead man to life, the matter would assume a much more serious aspect. And if then, true to my promise, I were to bid that man to come forth from the grave, and he arising forthwith, be again a living man even as he had been before death snatched him away from his friends, the truth of the revelation vouchsafed to me would thereby be placed beyond all possibility of doubt. Because as there is no power under heaven that can restore the dead to life, God Himself must have raised that man from the grave; and as this was done for the express purpose of confirming the truth of a supposed revelation, God thereby gave His own infallible testimony to the truth of that same revelation. Consequently, the objection that it is impossible to distinguish a true revelation from a mere subjective delusion vanishes into thin air. The very fact that God has created the universe, and established the laws which govern the actions of created beings, gives Him at once the right and the power of interfering with the ordinary course of nature, and that interference must necessarily carry conviction to every unbiased mind. Of this, however, we shall treat more in detail in the next chapter.
Lastly, even if a person were inclined to reject all that has thus far been said as untenable, the possibility of supernatural revelation would still remain intact: because if need be, God can assume a human nature and thus impart knowledge by word of mouth, even as man speaks to man. This was done in the case of Christ, Who as God-Man spoke to His disciples and revealed to them the hidden things of God. In such a case, it is true, He would have to convince the world of His divine personality, but would that be impossible to a God whose wisdom and power are infinite? Hence to say that supernatural revelation is impossible, is but an exhibition of the most colossal ignorance of the relations that must necessarily exist between the Creator and the creature.
Nor can it be objected that such a revelation, though possible, would be useless. For, supposing even that God were to reveal nothing except what men can find out for themselves by the right use of their reason, yet a revelation of these same truths would be of the greatest use. Who will make the foolish assertion that schools are useless, because children might, absolutely speaking, learn by their own endeavors what is taught them by their teachers? Destroy your schools, leave your boys and girls to their own devices in matters of education, and in a few decades our splendid civilization will have disappeared from the face of the earth. So it is precisely with the religious education of the human race. If God does not take upon Himself the teaching of mankind, the grossest ignorance concerning man's most essential duties must be the inevitable result. This is sufficiently clear from the history of the past. The pagan nations of old were to a certain extent left without the light of revelation, and as a result the knowledge of God and His law was almost completely lost. Nay, even those great minds, such as Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, who applied themselves exclusively to the study of philosophy and natural theology, had but a very imperfect knowledge of religious truths. And yet men are under strict obligation of knowing these truths and the duties flowing therefrom; for without such knowledge they cannot render God that service for which they were created. Hence not only is the revelation of these truths highly useful, but it is even morally necessary. Men could indeed, absolutely speaking, acquire them by their own efforts, yet the difficulties in the way are such that the vast majority would be doomed to utter failure.
Again, there are very many truths that are wholly beyond the reach of unaided reason, which it would, however, be useful for man to know. Reason alone could never come to a knowledge of such mysteries, for example, as that of the Most Blessed Trinity, the Incarnation, the elevation of human nature to the supernatural state, the beatific vision, and a thousand others most intimately connected with God's being and man's eternal destiny. That such supernatural truths really exist, must be evident to all who give the matter serious thought. For on the one hand God is infinite, that is, He possesses all perfections without limit, and on the other, man's intellect is limited; it cannot go beyond a certain range; consequently, there must be many truths the existence of which man does not even suspect. To hold the contrary is to assert either that man is infinite, or that God is finite, both of which assertions are manifestly absurd. I know there is a certain class of men who abhor the very name of mystery. To admit the existence of mysteries is to their minds a conclusive proof of intellectual weakness. And yet have these learned gentlemen (for as such they pose before the world) ever taken account of the hundreds and thousands of mysteries which they admit every day of their lives? Do they know what is the nature of electricity or magnetism or color? Can they tell how the grass grows in the field, and how the hair waxes long upon their learned heads? No real scientist has ever yet dared to give a final answer to these and similar questions. They freely admit that nature is full of mysteries, and that these mysteries become all the more real as man enters the more deeply into nature's secrets. It is only the shallow, the superficial, the newspaper-scientists, who dare utter the foolish boast that nature is to them an open book. And yet if nature has her mysteries, why should not the Godhead admit of the same? Is nature more perfect than God? Will you deny to the Creator what you are forced to concede to the creature?
But, reply these Rationalists, even if we concede that supernatural mysteries exist, they certainly do not admit of being revealed to man. The very fact that they are mysteries places them beyond the reach of finite intelligence, and so they cannot possibly become the objects of human knowledge. Why should God tell us about this mystery or that, if we can never know what it all means? This objection is frequently urged by men who seem convinced that they are really very learned, and yet if they had only a little common sense and common honesty, they would be utterly ashamed of raising such a difficulty. It is true enough that we can never know the inmost nature of a supernatural mystery, but that is no reason why the revelation of such a mystery should not afford us most useful knowledge. Thus, for instance, we do not know how human nature can be so intimately united to a divine person that its actions become attributable to God Himself, as is the case in the Incarnation; yet we know very well what we mean when we say that Christ is both God and man. The Incarnation is a mystery in the strictest sense of the term; we cannot even begin to explain it; nevertheless, the revelation of the mere fact itself puts before us a proof of God's boundless love that far surpasses all we can gather from the created universe. Creation teaches us that God of His infinite goodness and love called us into being, so that we might have a share in His own happiness; but the Incarnation goes beyond this, in as much as it shows that God so loved the world as to give His own Son to save that which was lost. And so with every other supernatural mystery, its revelation draws us closer to the heart of God, and opens up to us new worlds of divine goodness and love.
Consequently, whether we consider supernatural revelation in itself, or weigh the difficulties that are urged against it, we encounter nothing that can make it appear impossible. On the other hand, God's supreme dominion over all His creatures postulates the possibility of such revelation; for in virtue of that dominion He can do with His creatures whatever involves no contradiction. Hence we can safely affirm that supernatural revelation is most certainly possible; and this is all we care for at present. Whether it is an actual fact, we shall consider in a subsequent chapter.
{1} Pages 48-57.
{2} Dan. II, 31.
{3} Acts X, 11.