THE greatest religious debate in the nineteenth century, I am inclined to think, was that between Dean Mansel and Frederick Denison Maurice. Mansel contended that God in his utmost being could not be revealed; that only certain notions about Him of a provisional character could be given; that all our thoughts of Him were relative to our intellectual weakness; that the Infinite was solely for the Infinite; that for man there could be nothing but temporal images of the Eternal Goodness. After this manner Dean Mansel wrote in his book, "The Limits of Religious Thought." With great learning, much acuteness, and the sincerest purpose to do good, Mansel built a prison in which he shut in forever our entire race, a prison so tremendous that God Himself could not enter; only his shadow might creep in through its crevices to hallow the inevitable gloom. Mansel was met by Maurice in his great

screen by which man shuts from his vision the world of reality, the world of God.

We may apply the word "revelation" to nature when nature is understood. Nature embodies the will of God; and wherever the veil of human ignorance is lifted from the face of nature, there the glory of the Lord is revealed. In the science of nature there has been a manifest approach to the order of the Divine Mind. When Copernicus revealed the true position of the earth and the planets to the sun, he tore away a tremendous veil from the face of the solar order; when Newton unified all the worlds in space by the force of gravity, he removed another veil; when Darwin traced the origin of species and the descent of man on his physical side, he took away yet another veil; when the physicist of to-day is breaking up atoms into ions and electrons and reducing the elements of matter to force, when he is finding a path through material things to the dim borderland haunted by spirits, he is stripping from the countenance of the cosmos the dark covering that has for ages made her an enigma and a horror. Let science take her way, let her remove veil after veil of human ignorance, let her push her path toward the great apocalypse of the God who lives in the order of his cosmos. We see at once how just is the application of the word "revelation" to this sphere of progress and

how wide is its scope. Whether he knows it or not, the scientist depends, for all his powers and all his inspirations, upon the Eternal Spirit; in lifting the veil of ignorance from the face of nature, he is God's prophet; he stands as a great servant in the great process of revelation.

It is, however, in the sphere of human life that we find the deep eternal meaning of revelation. What God does for us here is the great, the infinite thing. In regard to the cosmos, His path is in the great waters and his footsteps are not known. When He enters human life, consumes the streams of selfishness and fills their black and deserted channels with the river of God which is full of water; when He lifts from the heart the veil of its ignorance and sin, gives it an original vision of his goodness, a sense of life's worth in the presence of its task, and an endless inspiration for high endeavor and hope; when in such a soul God's character becomes a call for a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness and an assurance to this end, then revelation stands forth as the sublimest word in human speech. Then it means the invasion of our being, through our best thoughts and deeds, of the Eternal God.

In our life and behind it is our Maker. How can He tell us his name, how can He win us to the vision of his character and his purpose for

man? Only as He succeeds in removing the dense veil of ignorance and sin. Our ignorance of our own being, the being of our brother, the moral order of society in which we live, the moral structure of the history out of which we have come, the moral universe in which we are contained like the ocean in its bed, and to whose powers we are responsive and accountable, — our ignorance covers the whole face of our human world and conceals from us the God who lives within it and beyond it. To the servant of the man of God the mountain was bare, untenanted, undefended, at the mercy of the embattled enemy; to the man of God himself the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire and his prayer was that his vision might become that of his servant. Thus it is with human life. To the menial soul it is solitary and desolate, open to attack on all sides, subject to invasion from woe and death, without defense and under sentence of doom; to the prophetic mind God is in all the tides of our existence and He waits to put forth his greater might through the beholding intellect and understanding heart.

1. We do well to consider Jesus as the great Revealer. The meaning of life lies in human personality. Human beings are centres of thought and love and character; they are centres of rational and accountable experience; they are in