Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/37

Rh things, let him have, as his reward, the fresh responsibility of showing himself faithful in many things. If he can gain five talents in one field, let him prove the like gifts in the higher task of ruling five cities.

This is the law of all spiritual promotion.

And this is the law by which Revelation justifies itself to those who, already, have found evidence for God in Nature. If there, 'mid this dance of plastic circumstance,' man has, in spite of imperfections in his grasp on truth, in spite of all the gaps and interspaces of darkness, yet had the heart and the brain to detect God at work, and to become aware of a vast scheme of ordered and rational good, within which he was to work, and by loyalty to which he was to be judged; then, in response to that loyalty already proved, in recognition of that intellectual and moral insight, let him step up on to a higher plane of existence; let him be admitted to a fuller vision; let him be made aware of yet further action that God has taken on his behalf; let him be brought up into touch with a yet more wonderful scheme of ordered and rational good, by which God has set Himself to redeem all this lower creation into harmony with that divine Consummation of all things in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Beginning and the End, the Secret Source and the Ultimate Fulfilment of the Purpose and Wisdom which hold all in one.

If there is this fresh development, if God has taken this further action, then, man is under obligation to understand it. For it is a fact; and facts carry with them responsibilities. They open new possibilities; and to refuse to know what these new facts are, is to reject the possibilities opened. So man is laid under probation by a Revelation. To ignore it is to refuse the invitation to come up higher.

Yet the probation imposed by a Revelation will be harder, severer, than any other. It will stretch further the faculties of nerve and brain. It will involve a fiercer strain. For it will ask us to put out a fuller trust in