C~P. B^sucKee

Natural anU iSebealea Eeligion.

A SERMON

PREACHED TO THE

CHURCH AT HARRISON SQUARE,

DORCHESTER DISTRICT, BOSTON, MASS., ,

May 19, 1878.

By C. D. BRADLEE,

THE PASTOR.

CAMBRIDGE:
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.
1878.

NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.

" A law unto themselves." — Rom. ii. 14.
T WISH to speak to-day of " Natural and Revealed
A Religion."
There is, and there can be, no real, honest, or
abiding strife between "Natural and Revealed Re
ligion," although they' have been too frequently
arrayed as opponents, and the champions on each
side have angrily maintained their cause, using in
the contest all sorts of hard names : by this poor
philosophy, this miserable subterfuge, and this tacit
confession of weakness, proving how each side
alone must inevitably fall to the ground. Why, if
we accept the statements as presented on each
side against the other, both sides would explode
at once ; a dark atheism would settle upon the
human heart, and an icy protest would arise against
all the light that gleams through conscience and
Scripture and Nature.
The two truths that are so intimately joined by
Almighty God, — revelation's grand teachings, and
Nature's sublime suggestions: truths that are inwoven
with each other, and whose fibres attach themselves
also to every other truth, — have been ruthlessly torn

asunder by man ; and thus has the Divine testimony
been robbed of half its power, while the voice from
above has been partially suffocated, terribly muti
lated, and wonderfully abridged. The students of
Nature, and the students of the Bible, ought to be
honest, hearty, and holy friends : they both have
forgotten their high commission if they stand op-.
posed, and their powers are lamentably dwarfed ;
for they are bound by reason, by religion, and by
common sense, to hold each other by the hand, and
in blessed harmony to search together, with devout
and loving hearts, the wonders of creation.
The terms natural and revealed, when applied to
religion, must be exactly understood ; and then we
shall see how absurd it is for any one to stir up a
rivalry between them. " Natural religion " is God's
voice in his works : it is Providence speaking through
the skies, the earth, the waters, and through man
himself, articulating . the message through brain,
heart, and body ; and again, it is the religion that is
simple, direct, clear, honest, earnest, and pure ; that
embraces the judgment, clasps the affections, and
opens to vision all outward glories and all inward
powers. " Revealed religion " is God's voice speak
ing out of the written word, or through inspired
human lips, or through a spiritual trance of the con
science and the soul, like that which visited St. Paul.
By thus transcribing the definition of each, we find
that they are very much alike; and we clearly see
that all religion is both natural and revealed, and
that it is arrant folly and consummate weakness for
us to suppose otherwise, or to argue on either side
alone.

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The Bible represents nothing to you or to me or to
anybody, unless it greets our natural capacities, and
presupposes in us certain faculties of perception, of
appreciation, and appropriation, without which the
great Book would be greeted coldly, its instructions
would fall like lead upon our hearts, and all its sanc-
•tity would be gone, through our foolish reception.
Celestial communications presuppose natural powers,
or else they stand as an eternal rebuke upon human
inability, and a secret sarcasm against a world's
paralysis. Again, Nature is a blank to you and to me and to
all, unless there be a revealing voice lurking in our
breasts, acting as interpreter and teacher, quickening
the imagination and heating the brain, and rousing to
intense activity the whole spiritual nature.
If you strike out this inward voice, and deny the
presence and instruction of this teacher, our race
would soon become a troop of maniacs ; the vast
wonders around us would crush our thoughts ; the
intonations on all sides, now so suggestive, grand,
and beautiful, would utter discordant notes to our
aching ears, and no measuring line could be thrown
around the mysteries that so thickly' engird us.
Then Astronomy would be a curse, because evoking
from the . skies only fresh horrors, and daily proving
to us our own insignificance, with no prophecy to
relieve it; then scientific minds would have to be
smothered, and the Humboldts, Newtons, and Her-
schels would be viewed as the most despicable of
tyrants. Let us thank God, my friends, that we are
not obliged thus to cover ourselves with a fog, but that
we can, with the Bible in our hands and with God's

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voice in our hearts, receive and rejoice in all the
glories that are around us, and express our reverent
gratitude to all the scholars that make them more
clear, more beautiful, and more potent.
The two parties in the Christian Church to-day, —
the naturalists and the supernaturalists, — are both in
the wrong that they stand alone, because their very .
right consists, as we have seen, in their liberal use of
each other. Let us look at their special claims, and
ascertain how much they are really worth. The nat
uralist starts from himself, and he establishes as his
formula this onesided statement : " What I cannot
understand, what does not seem to me to come within
the sweep of common sense, what my mental hand
cannot grasp, — that I will not believe. I intend to
take Nature for my only guide, for there can be
no deception on this ground. Here I can learn that
there is a God, that there is a law, that there is a
retribution ; and here I can pluck the great truths
of the brevity of life, of the certainty of death, and
also, I think, the hint of immortality. I am ready to
believe revelation so > far as it agrees with what I
already know, but no farther ; hence I must doubt all
human proclamations of Diyine precepts and prom
ises and threatenings, except so far as I can compre
hend them. It is sufficient for me to study myself,
— a vast study and a life study, giving me no time
for any other pursuit. If I take revelation-just as it
is given to us in the Bible, I am confounded often
by what seems to me contradictions in history and
chronology, in witnesses and types and internal and
external evidence."
But to such let us answer with all due solemnity :

In trusting to yourself 'you are trusting somewhat to a
revelation ; for you are listening to your transcript of
eternal truth, to your conception of infinite realities ;
and are you not as liable to confusion, to error, and
to weakness here as anywhere? Do not your con
clusions run the same risk of being fallible, as you say
were the conclusions of the prophets, of the priests,
of the apostles, and even of the Good Shepherd him
self ? Which support is the more apt to be brittle, —
our own foundation, or that of the Bible ; our catch
ing of Heaven's tones, or those records that the blood
of martyrs and the sanctity of ages have left for us ?
Did Socrates stand on a firmer foundation than How
ard ? Was Plato a greater man than William Penn ?
Did Voltaire exhibit the grandeur of manhood so
.much as Fe'ne'lon?
Next, let us look at the assertions of the one-sided
supernaturalist. With such a person there seems to be the terrible
necessity of exalting the Word of God at the expense
of his works. By him, every thing, save the Bible,
is spoken of with contempt; as if all Nature had
risen in rebellion against the two Testaments, and
had agreed to enter upon the foolish project of
obscuring the glory of God.
This extra-spiritual man says to his antagonist :
"You are a materialist; your fancies run away with
you; you lack the grace of God, and a certain in
ward light which God only bestows upon the favored.
For God's works are not much for man : they may
be grand, but they are cold ; human nature cannot
explain them, or be helped by them ; they do not com
fort and inspire and prophesy and forgive ; of them-

selves they put us back rather than lead us forward.
for they start queries which they can never answer,
and they raise doubts that can rarely be solved.
The most lovely spots on the earth, that have not
received the rays of Bible truth, are blighted ; the
beautiful landscape, the serene sky, the charming
climate, all the profusion of the arts and the sci
ences, — these have availed nothing, because ' God's
Book ' was absent, and. its brilliant lights were shut
out from the people and the place."
But the disciples on this side of the Church state
too much in their endeavor to brace celestial record ;
they go too far, and that is quite as bad for their
side as if they went not far enough. For our eyes and
our ears protest against this slight upon Nature ; we
know that when we came into this world we were
ordered, through the very make of our bodies, to
look and to hear, to be conscious of the splendors
around us, and to catch the tones of God, equally
resonant in a lily or a rosebud as in the music of
the spheres or the rolling of the waves. Therefore,
if we erase our natural faculties, we only outrage our
Maker and slander ourselves.
The grand declaration of the one-sided super-
naturalist is, that revelation is every thing ; and so it
is, and so it must be, in one sense : but so it is not,
and so it never can be, in his sense. Revelation, that
confines its history and shuts up its testimonies be
tween the first chapter of Genesis and the closing
chapter of the Apocalypse ; that traces Divinity no
where else, and makes the Father's presence limited,
— such a revelation will never save souls, will never
people heaven, and will never wake us up from un-

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holy sleep ; for it is too partial, too narrow, and too
bigoted. But the revelation that spans the Bible and
the world ; that admits God in the heart and in the
Testaments; that sees Divinity folded sweetly in a
leaf, or blade of grass, as well as resting on a prophet's
message ; that joins the voice of the Infinite in close
and unbroken relations with His works, — this is
every thing; and the one denying it denies every
thing. We come now plainly to a reiteration of our previ
ous proclamation, that the supernaturalists and the
naturalists must be joined together ; for thus the
earth-life and the heaven-life will be enriched,
enlarged, and sanctified.
We are always quite too ready to brand some people
as infidels : and so they may be, and that word may
describe their true character, if they have proved un
faithful to their privileges, if they have viewed truth
only on one side, and have but half scanned the
earth and the heavens. But, friends, are they not
also infidels, and terribly unfaithful, who despise
God's earth, who demean the temporal, who live as
if life were a curse, and who read their Bibles as if
the chart there were only a direction to get to
heaven, and not a series of laws that are ordained
to make the earthly life beautiful, sweet, grand,
happy, and glorious? Are not those people infidels
who live all the time as if life were a mistake and
birth a curse?
It appears to me that such are as far astray as those
on the other side ; they appear to deserve quite
as much censure, and to be devoid to an equal extent
of the grace of God that passes all understanding.

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They are reclining, like the blind Bartimeus, by the
wayside ; and they will be blind till Jesus shall come
and open their eyes. How are we taught by the
Head of the Church, who lived with us that life
might be made holy, life's path plain, and life's
duties easy ; who defined what true religion was,
and, what was better, acted true religion aut?
Jesus studied prophecy, and performed miracles,
and was the central figure in revelation. So also
he looked at the lilies, at the sparrows, at the grass
of the fields ; so also he inwove his grandest and
most startling discourses with pictures of seed-time
and of harvest, of wind and of wave, of daily occu
pations and of hourly duties. He notices fishermen,
and speaks, by a happy transposition of terms, of the
fishers of men ; the tax-gatherers, and hints concern
ing the heavenly tribute ; the multitudes of Samari
tans approaching him, and exclaims concerning the
fields white for the harvest. So everywhere the Lord
sees truth concealed, and publishes it. Shall we,
then, recklessly strike out Nature ? Then many of
the most touching and graphic and startling pages of
the New Testament must be blotted out.
Shall we strike out revelation? Then we throw
the world into chaos, dismantle our own minds
and souls, and are shipwrecked again with no hope
of salvation. " A law unto themselves." So, ac
cording to the Apostle Paul, were the Gentiles pre
vious to .their knowledge of God and of Christ ; and
he asserts also that they were accountable if they
trespassed against this law that was hidden in their
hearts. Hence there is a faint light, even outside
the Gospel, which must be made by uninstructed

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minds " the means of grace," and by the Christian
must be developed to its full force by the power of
revealed truth.
The Bible is to be reverently studied, all parts of
it ; for God has ordained that it shall bear a large
share in our regeneration : he has stamped it with
his approval, he has filled it with his spirit, and
he has spoken to us out of its pages. From Gene
sis to Revelation there are messages that are waiting
for our souls ; and only as we take up the Great
Book with a believing spirit, read it with an honest
heart, and obey its precepts with an earnest will, can
we hope to be happy, pure, and holy.
So, also, this beautiful world in which we live,
with all its varied and rich and startling suggestions,
is set before us for a sacred study. Its changing sea
sons are all special oracles for our hearts : springtime,
with its pledge of resurrection, when the seeds that
are sown in the earth make us think of the seeds of
truth that must be ever sown ere the harvest come,
and when the singing of birds is somewhat the echo
of the chants of the angels, and when every thing
bids us hope ; summer, when the sun paints the
flowers in their full splendor, ripens the grass, warms
the air, and sheds a lustre all around; autumn,
that brings rich fruit and foliage, and proves to us
how shifting are the scenes of life ; and winter, that
somehow seems to teach of death, and yet tries to
clothe its teachings in the robe of whiteness, — by
the purity of its snow desiring to make known to us
that even the tomb has some gracious, beautiful, and
inspiring light about it.
So the world, by its seasons, by all its changes

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and lessons, is ordained for our teacher ; and, with
the Gospel, endeavors to emancipate us from all sin.
Let us, then, believing in Nature and accepting reve
lation, hearing God's voice through his works and
his word, joining what we can see with the open eye
and what we can learn with the attentive ear with
what comes through the open gate of heaven and
by the voice of God's Son, — let us thus grow strong
in goodness and faith and love, and make every day a
day's journey nearer to Heaven !