Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: RELIGION AND REVELATION |HE relation between the soul of man and the life of God, which constitutes religion, is, indeed, instinctive, but it needs to be made definite. It cannot well be left to the unaided experience of the individual man. The individual may not be able to perceive God either clearly or truly. By reason of the shortcomings of his mind, or of the defects of his character, he may fall into error concerning God, or may lose sight of Him. Moreover, in so great a matter as this, the individual needs to avail himself of the privilege of the race. In religion, as in science, in art, and in politics, he is entitled to the results of past experience. The world into which he conies is an old world. Little as is the total fund of our knowledge of it, such knowledge as we have is mightily useful. On the basis of it, each newgeneration begins. We are the children of all the inventors, reasoners, discoverers, of the past. We enter into their labors. We are taught in our youth what they learned with pain and patience in the maturity of their studies. We begin with their books: books of science, books of geography and history, books of religion. A number of the most useful of the books of religion are bound together in the Bible. They contain the experiences and conclusions of men who were masters of the religious life. They bring to us the results of their study of the soul of man and of the being of God. They tell us what God said to them. Such a communication from God to men may be made in one or other of two ways : by dictation, or by inspiration. According to the doctrine of dictation, God has revealed His will to men by speaking in audible words out of the sky, or by guiding the hands of the writers of sacred books. The prophet by whom, under these cond...