reason, which it brings into more explicit consciousness and vitalizes
with a new power of stimulus, they may be profitable to us all; but they
must be received with due criticism and discernment as themselves
subject to a higher rule of truth--namely, the teaching of the Universal
Church.

But to determine, with respect to these and kindred revelations, how far
they may be regarded as an expression of the recipient's own mind and
latent consciousness, will need a digression which the general interest
of the question must excuse.

There is a tendency in the modern philosophy of religion (for example,
in Mr. Balfour's _Foundations of Belief_) to rationalize inspired
revelation and to explain it as altogether kindred to the apparently
magical intuitions of natural genius in non-religious matters; as the
result, in other words, of a rending asunder of the veil that divides
what is called "super-liminal" from "subliminal" consciousness; to find
in prophecy and secret insight the effect of a flash of unconscious
inference from a mass of data buried in the inscrutable darkness of our
forgotten self. Together with this, there is also a levelling-up
philosophy, a sort of modernized ontologism, which would attribute all
natural intuition to a more immediate self-revelation on God's part than
seems quite compatible with orthodoxy.

But neither of these philosophies satisfy what is vulgarly understood by
"revelation," and therefore both use the word in a somewhat strained
sense. For certainly the first sense of the term implies a consciousness
on the part of the recipient of being spoken to, of being related
through such speech to another personality, whereas the flashes and
intuitions of natural genius, however they may resemble and be called