(_b_) But we deny that external revelation is therefore useless or impossible. Even if religious ideas sprang wholly from within, an external revelation might stir up the dormant powers of the mind. Religious ideas, however, do not spring wholly from within. External revelation can impart them. Man can reveal himself to man by external communications, and, if God has equal power with man, God can reveal himself to man in like manner. Rogers, in his Eclipse of Faith, asks pointedly: “If Messrs. Morell and Newman can teach by a book, cannot God do the same?” Lotze, Microcosmos, 2:660 (book 9, chap. 4), speaks of revelation as “either contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or continually repeated in men’s hearts.” But in fact there is no alternative here; the strength of the Christian creed is that God’s revelation is both external and internal; see Gore, in Lux Mundi, 338. Rainy, in Critical Review, 1:1-21, well says that Martineau unwarrantably _isolates_ the witness of God to the individual soul. The inward needs to be combined with the outward, in order to make sure that it is not a vagary of the imagination. We need to distinguish God’s revelations from our own fancies. Hence, before giving the internal, God commonly gives us the external, as a standard by which to try our impressions. We are finite and sinful, and we need authority. The external revelation commends itself as authoritative to the heart which recognizes its own spiritual needs. External authority evokes the inward witness and gives added clearness to it, but only historical revelation furnishes indubitable proof that God is love, and gives us assurance that our longings after God are not in vain. (_c_) Hence God’s revelation may be, and, as we shall hereafter see, it is, in great part, an external revelation in works and words. The universe is a revelation of God; God’s works in nature precede God’s words in history. We claim, moreover, that, in many cases where truth was originally communicated internally, the same Spirit who communicated it has brought about an external record of it, so that the internal revelation might be handed down to others than those who first received it.