WHEN a man makes his own mind the measure of his knowledge of good, he soon sinks to the level of that by which he measures it; indeed he is already sunk there morally. He judges of what God ought to be, of what a revelation ought to be if there was one, by his own mind and feelings.
A book presents itself as a revelation from God; and he judges that it is not one. By what rule is his judgment formed? By what his own mind is, independent of revelation, which he subjects to the test of his own thoughts, when the book is subjected to him as such. He can do this only in virtue of the competency of his mind to judge, before he has received it, what a revelation ought to be. That is, his own mind, and even his own mind in its present state is the measure by which revelation is to be judged of. Were it so, the mind of God must be on a level with the mind of man, and even of the particular man who judges. But the fallacy of such a principle, as well as the excessive self-sufficiency of it, is evident.
First, the measure of what the Divine Being ought to be or require (for if it be a revelation by Him, it must declare what He is, or what He requires) will vary with the moral condition or the natural disposition of each individual who seeks to form a judgment. More than this, it will vary with the circumstances in which a man is placed, with the age of the world in which he lives, with everything through which he has passed in emerging out of the state of natural ignorance of all things in which he began his life, and which have exercised an influence in forming his character.
THE man of intelligence produces human infidelity. The man of imagination will give us human superstition, colored over with the haze of antiquity, for fear what it really is should be too clearly seen. Both give me man. The Scriptures alone give me God. Hence the peculiar form of modern infidelity is, attack on the written Word—the Scriptures. Superstition takes exactly the same ground. The cry of “Bibliolatry!” sounds alike from the intellectual and from the superstitious infidel. Both have the same object of attack, both are infidels—one an intellectual, the other an imaginative one. Both would persuade me that the Bible cannot itself command my conscience and oblige me to faith as coming from God. Do they not both seek to do this? Is it not infidelity? Doubtless, through the sinfulness of man’s will, without divine grace, he never will really receive the Word as it is in truth—the Word of God. But is that His fault or the Word’s? Infidels and superstitious persons will both tell me that the Word itself has not divine authority over my soul; that I cannot receive it as such on its own authority without something more to prove it. It is hard to say who is guiltiest here: he who denies it is the Word; or he who, not denying that it is, declares that what God has said cannot bind the conscience of man unless validated by some authority other than its own.