The objection may be raised—­“But these beliefs change, and merely reflect the degree of enlightenment or its opposite, which every man has reached.”  The conscience of the savage tells him emphatically that there are some things which he must not do; and blind obedience to this “categorical imperative” has produced not only all the complex absurdities of “taboo,” but crimes like human sacrifice, and faith in a great many things that are not.  “Perhaps we are leaving behind the theological stage, as we have already left behind those superstitions of savagery.”  Now the study of primitive religions does seem to me to prove the danger of resting religion and morality on unreasoning obedience to a supposed revelation; but that is not my position.  The two forces which kill mischievous superstitions are the knowledge of nature, and the moral sense; and we are quite ready to give both free play, confident that both come from the living Word of God.  The fact that a revelation is progressive is no argument that it is not Divine:  it is, in fact, only when the free current of the religious life is dammed up that it turns into a swamp, and poisons human society.  Of course we must be ready to admit with all humility, that our notions of God are probably unworthy and distorted enough; but that is no reason why we should not follow the light which we have, or mistrust it on the ground that it is “too good to be true.”

Nor would it be fair to say that this argument makes religion depend merely on feeling.  A theology based on mere feeling is (as Hegel said) as much contrary to revealed religion as to rational knowledge.  The fact that God is present to our feeling is no proof that He exists; our feelings include imaginations which have no reality corresponding to them.  No, it is not feeling, but the heart or reason (whichever term we prefer), which speaks with authority.  By the heart or reason I mean the whole personality acting in concord, an abiding mood of thinking, willing, and feeling.  The life of the spirit perhaps begins with mere feeling, and perhaps will be consummated in mere feeling, when “that which is in part shall be done away”; but during its struggles to enter into its full inheritance, it gathers up into itself the activities of all the faculties, which act harmoniously together in proportion as the organism to which they belong is in a healthy state.

Once more, this reliance on the inner light does not mean that every man must be his own prophet, his own priest, and his own saviour.  The individual is not independent of the Church, nor the Church of the historical Christ.  But the Church is a living body and the Incarnation and Atonement are living facts still in operation.  They are part of the eternal counsels of God; and whether they are enacted in the Abyss of the Divine Nature, or once for all in their fulness on the stage of history, or in miniature, as it were, in your soul and mine, the process is the same, and the tremendous importance of those historical facts which our creeds affirm is due precisely to the fact that they are not unique and isolated portents, but the supreme manifestation of the grandest and most universal laws.