It has been dropped because it has merely ceased to be of any particular service in Christian theology. It does not throw any light for the forms of thinking, now in use, on the character and purposes of God. King, in his "Reconstruction in Theology," devotes some pages to the miraculous, but his interest in it seems to be general rather than specific. There is no one particular miracle upon which he lays any stress. Take away this one or that one, no matter much which one, and he will not miss it. So, he is arguing not for particular miracles, nor even, (one might say) for miracles, but for miraculousness. The reports of them are in the record and he thinks he must do something about them. That something is to try to show that the miraculous can not be declared to be impossible, if we are to have a living God. I do not dispute that point myself-though I do not think it would necessarily be admitted by everyone. But observe that after King has gone to such lengths to demonstrate the possibility of the miraculous, he proceeds to a discussion of the divinity of Christ, of immortality, and of other cardinal points in Christian theology, without once making the slightest reference to the miracles whose abstract possibility he has so laboriously established. Nothing in his system appears to depend upon miracles or be related to them. For the problems which miracles used to solve, when I was a boy, he can solve better without them. In his thinking the miracles have changed places, and are problems and not solutions. All this lack of interest in the miracles goes back to our modern idea of revelation. What we want of revelation is not a knowledge of particular doctrines or events, but knowledge of God himself. The revelation I want of you from

you is not the communication of some secret information. What I want from you is a revelation of yourself, your purposes, your character;-and that revelation you are constantly and effortlessly making to me. The revelation of God is not the communication of ideas or the knowledge of facts which we couldn't find out for ourselves, but a revelation of the character and nature of God himself. And this revelation he is constantly making in the orderly processes of nature and the every day experiences of human life. The kind of God he is, is the kind he shows himself to be in those processes and experiences. Now (without debating ourselves into agreement on a definition, but staying well within what everyone will admit) miracles are at least a deviation from the established order. And the difficulty with them is that so far from throwing light on the divine character for the forms of thinking now in use they seem to obscure or confuse it. If God is revealed in the natural order, an interruption of that order, and the substitution for it at some point, of a non-natural or an anti-natural or a super-natural order, adds nothing to my working knowledge of God, but seems on the contrary to introduce a disturbing factor into the ideas of him which I had gained from his more regular proceedings. If all your life you do things that indicate that you are a certain kind of man, except that once when you were twenty and again when you were thirty-four, and once again when you were forty-three, you did something entirely inexplainable by all the rest of your acts of a lifetime something as we would say which did not appear to express your real character,-you can hardly be said to have advanced the process of your selfrevelation by these acts. So it is of God. He is re

vealed in the natural order, both of things and persons. How then can he be revealed in the violation or the deviation from that order? I believe that such considerations as these explain why the miraculous occupies a smaller place in Christian thought than it did a generation or two ago.

God is revealed then in nature. But this revelation of him is partial and incomplete. He is further revealed in human experience. Mankind is his great revelation. History is his great story, the record of his patience, his love of progress, his willingness to put up with slights and abuses, and the severity with which he ultimately sweeps them away. But in the recesses of a man's own heart, and in the depths of his own experiences with other human beings, God stands most profoundly revealed to him. This love that I feel for my fellows, the shame that mantles my cheeks at my own folly and sin, the prick of conscience, the hope of moral improvement, the fear of my own condemnation,-if things like these do not testify as to the ultimate constitution of the universe, and therefore as to the character of God, we cannot hope to know anything on the subject. We must get rid for good of the old antithesis between revelation and knowledge.

If God is in his world, all knowledge about the world, whether of the physical world outside us, or the moral world within us, or the world of human personalities, is ultimately knowledge about God. It is also and equally a revelation of God. All knowledge is raw material of revelation, since it is knowledge of that which reveals itself, and without whose revelation of itself there would be nothing to know. All revelation comes by the processes of human knowledge, for neither

God nor man can put an idea into any mind except by the co-operation of that mind. The mind is not like a box, into which you can put more or less and of any kind you choose. It is active in all knowledge. Nothing can get into it except what it can take in. But neither can it take in anything that is not revealed to it by some fact or agency or existence outside it. Revelation is not a process that begins where knowledge leaves off. What God reveals is what man discovers, and what man discovers is what God reveals. All knowledge comes by experience, by reflection, by thought. But no knowledge comes without something to be known, in other words, without something to reveal itself to the mind that is to know it. All knowledge is knowledge of God and there is no knowledge but that which comes by the revelation of God.

Now the Bible is a revelation of God because human experience is a revelation of God; and the higher, clearer, more significant the human experience, the higher, clearer, more important the revelation of God which it carries. The Bible is the record, in part, of the revelation of God in human life. As to the superior importance and value of this portion of revelation in comparison with other recorded revelations, nobody need be in any doubt. It is an established fact. The Bible has exerted, and continues to exert, an influence which no other book does. No one hears of any proposal to put the Bible on a par with other books, or any suggestion that when we are in trouble or in doubt we should go elsewhere among books for supreme help and counsel. As a matter of fact, the people whom we know learn from the Bible what they do not learn from any other book, about God, about duty, and about the ideals of life. As a matter of

history, certain results follow, where the Koran goes, and where the Bible goes, certain other results follow; and the contrasting results speak for themselves. All doctrines of inspiration, so far as I see, have been intended to account for and guarantee this difference between the Bible and other books. They have sought to prevent people from forgetting this difference, and to insure that the Bible shall never sink to the level of other books. Grant that the difference is perfectly obvious, that nobody can forget it; that it has been acknowledged wherever the Bible has gone;-how can any doctrine of inspiration strengthen that which is stronger and less open to doubt than the doctrine is itself?

Not everything in the Bible is better than anything outside it. That would be to discredit the work of God everywhere else. If you are in trouble over the death of some friend I think it likely that "In Memoriam" will be of much more help to you than the books of Chronicles, but not the gospel of John; or if you are perplexed in faith, God will get to you much more intimately in Whittier's "Eternal Goodness" than in the book of Esther. Some things, also, we wish were in the Bible that are not there. The Christian ideal has been growing and adding to itself from the beginning and is still growing. One very striking feature in it today, is the big place that can only be filled by the contribution a man makes to the world by his daily work. When I conduct the funeral of a man not specially learned or pious who has done, through forty or fifty years one good day's work after another, I generally read from an Old Testament apocryphal book, "Let us now praise famous men, even the artificer and work-master. All these put their trust