at all, to arrive at a certain amount of religious truth. Now there is no doubt that by a study of nature and by self-examination men may come to know something of God. But it is absurd to call this knowledge natural, in contradistinction to revealed, for nature and man are themselves revelations. Nature is not silent and dead. She is resonant with voices that speak to us of God :—

"There is a tongue in every leaf,
A voice in every rill,—

A voice that speaketh everywhere,
In flood and fire, through earth and air,—
A voice that's never still."

'Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language [in one sense]; their voice is not heard; [and yet in another sense] their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." Man, too, is a divine revelation. "He who truly knows himself," said St Chrysostom, "knows God." If we are the children of God, if we have been made in His image, then He must have revealed Himself in us. If conscience be the voice of God, its teaching, however natural, must be also revelatory. In other words, all

truth is revealed truth, and apart from revelation there could be no natural religion.

Similarly, exception may be taken to the oftmade attempt to distinguish between natural and supernatural religion. I pointed out to you some months ago that always and everywhere the natural and supernatural are interwoven.1 We must be blind if, on the one hand, we do not see in nature something more than the natural, and if, on the other hand, we do not discover even in the most sublime doctrines of our holy religion some naturalness-that is, some harmony with the rest of our human experience. Since, then, the natural and the supernatural are eternally inseparable, the attempt to draw a sharp line of demarcation between. them in matters of religion is misleading and

erroneous.

There are two distinctions, however, which it is really important for us to recognise the distinctions, viz., between Biblical and non-Biblical, between Christian and non-Christian, revelation. And of these the most important is the second. For while our Scriptures, taken as a whole, are vastly superior to the Scriptures of other religions, it is possible, as we shall find, to

1 See 'Origin of Evil; and other Sermons.'

extract sentences from other sacred writings which are almost identical with some in our own. But the revelation of God in Christ is in all respects unique. In order that we may clearly see its superiority, let us ask what had been previously achieved. And let us begin as nearly as we can at the beginning.

Long before the dawn of history, long before the time of Abraham or of Homer, our ancestors, and the ancestors of all those nations which are now classed together under the name of Aryan, were dwelling in the centre of Asia as a single and undivided people. These progenitors of Celt and Teuton, Anglo-Saxon and Indian, Scandinavian and Iranian, had in their language a word, Dyauspitar,1 which means in English Heaven-Father. In the records of the past there is nothing more beautiful, nothing more suggestive, nothing more confirmatory of the truth of our text, than this simple fact. It teaches us that those old Aryans, thousands of years ago, had looked up to the infinite azure and been filled with awe-nay, more, that they

1 The existence of this word, or one very similar to it, in the prehistoric Aryan language, is proved by the existence of the words Dyauspitar, Zeupater, and Jupiter in the derivative languages of Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin.

had looked through it and been inspired with trust. They had penetrated in thought

66

'Beyond the verge of that blue sky
Where God's sublimest secrets lie."

They had learnt to say, vaguely it may be, and hesitatingly, but still with faith and hope, the words that Christ has made immortal,-“ Our Father which art in heaven." 1

But this primeval worship soon became corrupt, and we need not be surprised that it did So. The unknown man who first conceived the idea and coined the expression "Heaven-Father," must have been a poet and a seer, gifted with "the vision and the faculty divine." To him, as to Goethe, nature was the garment of God. He would ask himself in effect, as Tennyson has asked,—

66

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?"

But this was too high a platform for the most of his contemporaries to occupy. Even now we find men constantly forgetting that emblems

1 Max Müller has traced a similar primitive religion in the Semitic and Turanian branches of the human family: "Everywhere men begin with the idea of sky, they rise to the idea of God, and they sink down again to the idea of gods and spirits."

are merely emblematic. Just as today the eucharistic symbol of Christ's sacrifice is often mistaken for the sacrifice itself, so those old Aryans came to consider that natural objects and phenomena not only revealed the Deity, but were themselves divine. Thus the worship of the Heaven-Father degenerated into a Physiolatry, or worship of nature. The great investing firmament was resolved into a number of separate entities. There was the god of dew and rain, the god of wind, the storm-god, and so on. This religion is unfolded in the Veda, which is the Scripture of the Hindus. We find there, amid much that is puerile, some truths that are of perennial sacredness and value. Though a number of inferior deities. are recognised, the word Dyauspitar still survives. The consciousness of sin, and the yearning for reconciliation, are ever present in the Vedic hymns. We read such passages as these : "How can I get near to Varuna ?1 when shall I, with a quiet mind, see him propitiated? Absolve us from the sins of our fathers, and from those which we have committed with our own bodies. Varuna is merciful even to him who has committed sin."

1 Varuna signifies the investing sky.