(a) The extraordinary, positive and supernatural 93revelation of the divine will, in the educative guidance of man by God, precedes indeed his own reason-knowledge as arising from the inner, general, natural revelation, but in a normal development of man it then gradually retires into the back-ground in proportion as his spiritual ripening advances. Its purpose is to awaken rational knowledge, and to conduct the awakened spirit to its spiritual majority; and hence it involves the virtualizing of the moral freedom and of the independent personality of the rational spirit.

The seeming contradiction that lies in the facts, that rational knowledge cannot be given in an immediate and ready form, but must be first attained to through moral effort, and that, on the other hand, all moral activity presupposes already the consciousness of the moral, is reconciled solely and simply by the fact that the creating God is also an educating one,—that He reveals to man Himself and his will,—even as also the child does not ripen to reason and maturity by being abandoned to itself, but by being educated by reason and to reason,—by having the moral consciousness which as yet slumbers in it awakened by instruction, and, when once awakened, then strengthened by actual moral example. Without instruction and training the child never becomes a truly rational person; and when, in harmony with the Christian system, we affirm the same thing of the first man, we do not thereby state anything inconsistent with the nature of man, but in fact simply that which is implied in the very nature of rational spirit-development. If for a moment we should, with Rousseau, conceive of the first generations of man as in a condition of animal unculture, creeping on all fours, and without speech, then we are utterly unable to learn from any of the champions of this theory in what manner these human-like animals could ever attain to reason and to a moral consciousness. We have in fact, in the case of the uncivilized tribes of the race—who, low as they are, are yet not so low as the above-supposed semi-men,—positive proof that 94man when once sunk into the condition of a savage never again rises to a higher culture, of his own strength.

Without a consciousness of God and of his will, man is as yet, on the whole, not rational; but man was created by God after his own image, and hence unto reason and unto morality. This implies of itself that this consciousness was necessarily shared in even by the first man. Now as man knows nothing of nature save as nature communicates herself to him through sensuous impressions, so also can man know nothing of God unless God reveals himself to him; and in fact a God who should not reveal himself is utterly unconceivable. If now a consciousness of the moral, that is of God’s will, is the necessary antecedent condition of all moral activity, and if, at the same time, all real rational knowledge springs from a moral using of such knowledge, then is it perfectly self-evident that the beginning of this knowledge must have been directly prompted by God himself. The fact that this first revelation is termed, in distinction from the self-wrought-out knowledge, an extraordinary and supernatural one, does not imply that it stands in contradiction or antagonism to the inner revelation in the self-developing spirit. On the contrary it is for the development of humanity in general both very natural and in harmony with general order; for, all life of individual objects, both in the spiritual and in the natural world, requires a first stimulation, an awakening influence from other already developed objects and beings; and this stimulating rises toward educative training in proportion as the perfection of the species rises; man has therefore, by virtue of his rational nature, a claim upon an educative influence from the rational spirit; and this is in fact the historical revelation. Man is not by his birth or creation already really a morally-rational spirit, he becomes so only by an educative influence from the rational spirit, and hence, in the case of the first man, from a primarily objective revelation from God. This revelation, however, does not remain in this objective character, but, in stimulating man to a moral consciousness and to moral activity, it brings him to the inner revelation in the rational nature of man himself—to a consciousness of his own God-likeness, and hence also to a consciousness of the divine prototype. The first man sustained to God an absolutely 95child-like relation, as to an educating father; and such is precisely the Biblical account of the primitive state. If we do not presuppose such an educative primitive revelation of the moral, then, either the moral law would have to exist, (as in irrational nature-creatures, so also in man) as a direct instinctive impulse,—in which case man would not be a moral being, but only a peculiar species of animal; or, a rational knowledge of the moral would have to be already created in him,—which would be contrary to all our notions of man’s spiritual development, and surely a much greater miracle than the one which it was designed to dispense with. That which has no need of training is either not a rational being, or it is God himself. The educative revelation presupposes indeed a corresponding moral endowment in man; but this moral endowment, the unconscious germ of the moral, has need, in order to its developing itself into reality, of a spiritual training. This training does not create the moral consciousness, but only awakens it—gives to it primarily definite contents, which the thus stimulated morally rational consciousness then perceives as not in antagonism but as in harmony with itself, and for that very reason appropriates to itself.

In order to man’s being really moral he must be conscious that in his free acting he freely subordinates himself to the will of God; but he can do this only when he recognizes the moral, not merely as such, but also as being of divine origin, and this he can do only when he distinguishes the divine will from his own; this distinguishing, however, is possible, for the first man, only when the divine will presents itself to him as other than his own, as objective to him,—when God expressly reveals himself to him. On this definite distinguishing of one’s own personal, from the divine will, depends all morality; a merely unconscious following of propension is not moral, but immoral. Man must become conscious that he does this or that act not simply because it pleases him, but that it pleases him because it pleases God. In this conscious, discriminating, free choosing of the divine will as distinguished from the merely natural individual will, man is expected to discover his essential difference from nature, his belonging to the kingdom of God; he is to learn to distinguish between “can” and “should,” between his ability 96and his obligation, and thus to become conscious of his moral destination to freedom. Were the moral consciousness or the moral impulse inborn in man, then he could not come to a consciousness of his freedom—of his ability morally to rise above his merely individual being, and freely to choose the divine. Herein lies the high moral significancy of the notion of an historical divine revelation. In the interest of freedom, in the interest of the training of man into a moral personality, we would have been forced philosophically, to presuppose such a revelation, did we not already know of it from Biblical teaching.