John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity. 23—“There is no such thing as a natural religion or religion of reason distinct from revealed religion. Christianity is more profoundly, more comprehensively, rational, more accordant with the deepest principles of human nature and human thought than is natural religion; or, as we may put it, Christianity is natural religion elevated and transmuted into revealed.” Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, lecture 2—“Revelation is the unveiling, uncovering of what previously existed, and it excludes the idea of newness, invention, creation.... The revealed religion of earth is the natural religion of heaven.” Compare _Rev. 13:8—_“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world” = the coming of Christ was no make-shift; in a true sense the Cross existed in eternity; the atonement is a revelation of an eternal fact in the being of God. Note Plato’s illustration of the cave which can be easily threaded by one who has previously entered it with a torch. Nature is the dim light from the cave’s mouth; the torch is Scripture. Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi’s Werke, 3:523—“If the gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have obtained so perfect an insight into them.” Alexander McLaren: “Non-Christian thinkers now talk eloquently about God’s love, and even reject the gospel in the name of that love, thus kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed. But it was the Cross that taught the world the love of God, and apart from the death of Christ men may hope that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, but they can never be sure of it.” The parrot fancies that he taught men to talk. So Mr. Spencer fancies that he invented ethics. He is only using the twilight, after his sun has gone down. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 252, 253—“Faith, at the Reformation, first gave scientific certainty; it had God sure: hence it proceeded to banish scepticism in philosophy and science.” See also Dove, Logic of Christian Faith, 333; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 442-463; Bib. Sac., 1874:436; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 226, 227. 2. Scripture and Rationalism. Although the Scriptures make known much that is beyond the power of man’s unaided reason to discover or fully to comprehend, their teachings, when taken together, in no way contradict a reason conditioned in its activity by a holy affection and enlightened by the Spirit of God. To reason in the large sense, as including the mind’s power of cognizing God and moral relations—not in the narrow sense of mere reasoning, or the exercise of the purely logical faculty—the Scriptures continually appeal.