A. The proper office of reason, in this large sense, is: (_a_) To furnish us with those primary ideas of space, time, cause, substance, design, right, and God, which are the conditions of all subsequent knowledge. (_b_) To judge with regard to man’s need of a special and supernatural revelation. (_c_) To examine the credentials of communications professing to be, or of documents professing to record, such a revelation. (_d_) To estimate and reduce to system the facts of revelation, when these have been found properly attested. (_e_) To deduce from these facts their natural and logical conclusions. Thus reason itself prepares the way for a revelation above reason, and warrants an implicit trust in such revelation when once given. Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 318—“Reason terminates in the proposition: Look for revelation.” Leibnitz: “Revelation is the viceroy who first presents his credentials to the provincial assembly (reason), and then himself presides.” Reason can recognize truth after it is made known, as for example in the demonstrations of geometry, although it could never discover that truth for itself. See Calderwood’s illustration of the party lost in the woods, who wisely take the course indicated by one at the tree-top with a larger view than their own (Philosophy of the Infinite, 126). The novice does well to trust his guide in the forest, at least till he learns to recognise for himself the marks blazed upon the trees. Luthardt, Fund. Truths, lect. viii—“Reason could never have invented a self-humiliating God, cradled in a manger and dying on a cross.” Lessing, Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, 6:134—“What is the meaning of a revelation that reveals nothing?”