‘Can it be supposed that God, if He were good and would that all men should be saved, would leave His revelation in doubt? A revelation which can be denied is no revelation. Would He have committed it to fallible men and to yet more fallible records and documents of men? Would He not have written it in flaming characters across the heaven, like the sacred sign that made the Emperor Constantine a Christian? Who will stake his all upon an hypothesis? Who will die for a superior probability? It cannot be a divine providence that loving souls, eager to believe, should be tossed to and fro as on a wild sea and be never at rest. Give me certainty, not an agony of doubt and fear. O God, if Thou be God, prove Thyself God.’ Oh! Gerald, Gerald, it is not the certainties of life (they are few enough) for which men die. The theories, hypotheses, uncertainties--these, and only these, may claim the supreme self-sacrifice. It is distrust in the goodness of God, I say again, which is the beginning of all unbelief. Gerald Eversley thought himself unfairly used by religion, and his reprisal lay in using religion with more unfairness. The truth is that if God be good, if He be, as the _Wisdom_ has it, a ‘lover of souls,’ then it is a natural presumption that He should anticipate the need of His children, by establishing an understanding or sympathy between Himself and them. Granted the goodness of God, inspiration and revelation, however understood, cease to be intrinsically difficult; they are natural, almost necessary. The one eternal paradox would be that God should care for men and should take no means to assure them of His care. But a treasure is not the less a treasure because it is in earthen vessels. The human record of a divine revelation may be looked at either broadly or in detail. If it be scrutinised microscopically, many flaws, fissures, faults will come to light. The element of humanity is in all things the element of error. It is only in the inviolate works of God in Nature that the microscope reveals ever new wonders of beneficence and beauty. But religion can never depend upon disputed points of authorship and chronology. Truth is self-luminous; it matters not who discovers or describes it. Names, places, dates, are the accidents of a religion; they are not of its essence. We need no proof of the sun in heaven. We need no proof of the Divine Life on earth. He who lived that Life called Himself the Son of Man. That one who is mere man should call Himself the Son of Man, were arrogance. But that one who is higher than man, stooping for a time to human estate, should call Himself the Son of Man, is the perfectness of condescension. More it is not necessary to define. ‘If you do not ask me,’ says the philosopher, ‘I know.’