And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come; and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of water. -Revelation 14: 6, 7.

As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made. As also he is in the moon, and is the light of the moon, and the power thereof by which it was made. As also the light of the stars, and the power thereof by which they were made. And the earth also, and the power thereof, even the earth upon which you stand. -Doctrine and Covenants 85: 2c, d, e, f.

Any attempt to explain and justify the doctrine of divine revelation must begin with an analysis of creation, because it is there we see the Creator at work. We take for granted here that God is personal and is, as well, the ground of all existence. So, then, as he is Creator, the world and all in it is his creature. If we begin with an analysis of nature and man and are led, as we shall be, to affirm that all find meaning only in a personal Will, then the universe is related to God as creature to Creator. The universe and man are not necessary to the existence of God. But the universe and men could not exist unless He did. The relation of God to the universe is not one of mutual interdependence. He exists in his own proper person apart from all else; while apart from him, all else has no existence. "In him we live and move and have our being" is a true definition of the relation between creature and Creator. However, it is not true to say that "in us" he lives and moves and has his being. God and the universe are not correlated, each depending upon the other for existence.

Law and Miracle

All there is came into being because God chose to utter his word and call creation forth. All continues to exist because from moment to moment he chooses to sustain it. He does this because it "seems good to him" and for his own purpose. Further it must be asserted that all things in "their times and seasons" are an expression of that divine will which constitutes their existence. God expresses himself-utters his word perpetually-in the songs of the birds, in the morning and the evening star, and in all of creation that we see and hear and half perceive (John 1: 1-3). The world is sustained and governed by the continuous indwelling of divine law. God is, in the language of Tertulian, "the persistent energy," impartial and completely self-consistent. He can be depended upon. There is no caprice in the steady, ceaseless expression of divine law. Thus science is possible, and art is possible. Man is himself also the creature of God, but one in whom caprice and frivolity have appeared. So, in order to express fully the utter fixity of his purpose, the infinite God must be capable of infinite gradations of adaptability to cause his creatures to conform to his purpose. Most men live by their routines. But these routines may be set aside when unusual circumstances arise to make it necessary. Such interruptions may well reveal more forcibly than the routines the deeper levels of character which, without such interruptions, would remain unsuspected. So God normally rules the world through the constancy of his law. But when the history of man moves to the point where man's existence is in jeopardy, then God does intervene with extraordinary measures to save. This he did in the Flood, in the calling, discipline, and election of Abraham, in the deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt, and most extraordinarily of all in the life of Jesus Christ. His will is constant, hence the never ending impartial exercise and operation of natural law. But his will is also personal; and he may, when he deems wise and proper, exert his power to serve his purpose. Miracles are co-existent with a personal God.

It is important to affirm that divine revelation is a matter of relating to both the ordinary and to the extraordinary. God is seen in the calm as well as in the storm; in the melody and in the dissonance, too; in the quiet places beside the still waters as well as in times of trial and stress. If God is, in any sense that can rightly be applied to that world, and if he is creator, then all occurrences can to some extent be made to reveal the nature and purpose of that God. This is the ground of the doctrine of revelation which constitutes the existence of the church and sustains its life. This doctrine grows out of an analysis of nature and history-out of creation itself, and is fulfilled in the actual communion of God with men. In this process of revelation, nature, man, and God are knit together, for without revelation there can be no peace between them.

All Is of God

And behold, all things have their likeness; and all things are created and made to bear record of me; both things which are temporal, and things which are spiritual; things which are in the heavens above, and things which are on the earth, and things which are in the earth, and things which are under the earth, both above and beneath, all things bear record of me. -Genesis 6: 66, I.V.

This, then, is where we may expect to find the revelation of the Eternal God. It is in all things: "I, the Lord, ruleth in the heavens above, and among the armies of the earth" (Doctrine and Covenants 60: 2).

He rules in Russia, and can be seen in such consequences as have been manifest in Russian history. He is revealed in the history of the Germans and the Italians, as his awful judgment upon Nazism and Fascism suggests. One who is alert to the consequences which follow conduct cannot fail to experience something of the divine nature. For unless he is revealed everywhere he cannot be apprehended anywhere. This is the meaning of the passage "Whither shall I flee from thy presence?" It is the divine presence which alone gives meaning and character to all existence, and there is actually nothing hid from that presence. That is the basic affirmation of our faith. It is the doctrine expressed in the terms, "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made which was made." It is the doctrine of creation.

So God has imposed on nature a law, which is massive and constant. If we could comprehend all nature and all history, perhaps we could comprehend the totality of the Divine Being. This, however, is manifestly impossible. Our view is very meager and partial and it is biased. We see things as we are. If we are true, we see truly. But who is wholly true? Since partiality and distortion of view are quite inevitable, and since human conduct has introduced sinful elements into the course of time, we need desperately some special revelation of the Divine Nature that will give us a clue to the meaning of the whole. Natural law testifies of the impartiality and utter self-consistency of the Divine Being. Jesus used his illustration of rain and sunshine to impress these aspects of his Father's character upon the minds of his disciples. Good or evil, each man counts for one, and for no more than one. But, in face of the special circumstances created by the exercise of personal agency in his creatures, God, who is personal, must move in special ways to meet these unusual and unlawful circumstances. God is holy, which means he is utterly and completely true to his own nature. Personality is only expressed fully as persons act and react in each other's lives. A man may live for fifty years obeying with others a regular daily routine, and all the time he may be saving his substance for some special act of sacrifice. The special act breaks his routine. But in breaking it he reveals his meaning by disclosing his deeper nature partially hidden in the routines. Similarly God rules the world by natural law. He rules in physics and chemistry, and in the minds of men by the law of association of ideas. These laws are his daily routines, so to speak. In the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, those routines were sublimated by a special act of sacrifice, and the meaning of the divine nature was more fully and completely disclosed than could ever have been had Jesus never lived on earth. The waves were stilled at a word. The bread was blessed and multiplied, and the minds of men flooded by the light of a revelation of God which could never have been arrived at by natural reason alone. "The same Word was made flesh." The ordinary routines were made significant by an extraordinary disclosure. But to assert this, and even to "prove" that the incarnation is possible and probably, is without meaning unless the Divine Person himself can now be apprehended. For fellowship with him is much more than ideas about him.

The Ground of Authority

How can the revelation of the eternal God in Christ be brought up to date and disclosed to us now? If Christ were an example and nothing more, our gospel is hopeless, because an example gains power and significance only as it is lived under contemporary circumstances. The earthly life of Christ is not contemporary. It is ancient. It was not lived in a world similar to ours. The Jews of his time were not modern Americans dressed up in fancy clothes. They thought and acted differently than do men and women now. The four short biographies of his life were penned in a far-off land, in a distant time, and in an alien culture. They are incomplete. They have been translated over and over again and have been revised times without number. The original documents are lost. These biographies do tell us that Christ lived. But they do not tell us completely how he lived. They point to a way of life. But they themselves are not that way of life. "The Word was made flesh." It was not made "printer's ink" to dwell among us. The Gospels tell of a divine life and glory. But they themselves are not that glory. That glory was in the life, and the biographies are records of that life. For the movement of God is always in the events of which the records tell. It is not in the book. The records, of course, are to be treasured. We may say, surely, that their preservation is miraculous. So be it. But let us be careful not to substitute a worship of the record of the life for the life itself. While we treasure the Scriptures as pointing the way, we cannot agree with the position taken in the encyclical of Leo XIII that the canon of Scripture is itself the revelation of God. The official translation of the passage in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus of 1893 is as follows.

All of the books, which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far it is from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration is not only essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true.

But can form of words be made to admit of only one singe solitary interpretation? Manifestly no! If mankind were in possession of a perfect language, it might be possible to utter or write words that would be one with what they tell of. Then words would not be words, but words would be deeds. It is further to be observed that a perfect language can grow only out of a perfect people, a people whose correspondence with their environment and each other would be utterly and completely true. Such a people may have emerged in the past, but even if this is so, we do not know their language. We affirm that God always speaks the truth. All things to him "seem as they are." The saints know this-and that is what makes them saints. Consider the following by Enos: "And there came a voice unto me saying, Enos, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou shalt be blessed. And I, Enos knew that God could not lie; wherefore, my guilt was swept away" (Enos 1: 7, 8)

The divine utterance is totally true. And it is true that holy men wrote and spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. But can any man, or has any man of himself, fully and completely apprehended and transmitted that utterance? Surely distortion and error must in some measure, however small, be present in the perceiving and transmitting of the divine word! This is a question of degree, of course. But it must be so, for God does not override and supersede normal human faculties. That he may be able do so must be admitted, but there is no evidence that he ever did. He would resort to the use of a donkey to instruct a stubborn prophet rather than override that prophet's own disposition. This is not to say that the spoken or written word has no value, or to assert that God does not enlighten, quicken, uplift, and bless men. He empowers them in their helplessness to do his will. But they must be disposed to have him do this, or it is not done. He does not supersede their natural faculties, nor set them aside to obtain his own way.

 The Question of Infallibility

It seems that mankind has an innate desire for an infallible standard of authority in spiritual things. Even the scientists worship the reign of law. This desire is no doubt expressed in the doctrine of the verbal inerrancy of the Scripture just referred to. But the centuries have proved the inadequacy of this doctrine. Following the teaching of St. Augustine (circa 400), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) suggests two principles for finding the true meaning and content of Scripture.

The first is to hold the truth of Scripture without wavering; the second is that since Holy Scripture can be explained in a multiplicity of senses, one should adhere to a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it, if it be proved with certainty to be false; lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing. -Summa Theologies, Part I, Q 58.

The subterfuge is obvious and tragic. Men are to believe the Scripture is the truth or conveys the truth. But what is it? If they apprehend what they believe it to mean, they may be mistaken. If they are mistaken they are still to assume the Scripture to be true. All the fault is theirs, since they simply have not grasped its meaning. So the trend went from an infallible writing (the Book) to an infallible custodian of the book (the Church), and from the infallible church to an infallible spokesman of the church (the Pope-who is supposedly infallible in matters of doctrine) but not necessarily impeccable in the matter of his own morals.

It cannot be conceived that the divine Father would set aside the natural faculties of men so as to endow fallible speech and writing with infallible meaning. When we read the Scripture we need the Spirit which moved its writing. When we turn from the book and examine the person in whom the book finds its testimony, we discover that he exercised absolute respect for the freedom of men. He called all men, for only thus could he choose any man. But his choice of any man was dependent upon that man's choice of him. He claimed the allegiance of all, but would use his miraculous power to compel none. Even his teaching was a call to adventurous thinking, rather than an utterance of formal doctrine for which he claimed acceptance merely on his own authority. This does not mean that he exercised no authority or that he formed no doctrine. It means that his authority was conditioned wholly in his supreme ability to inspire and guide men to think for themselves, and thus to evoke their loyalty to him. While the revelation of the eternal God was certainly to be found in what he taught, salvation simply could not be achieved by the mere acceptance of propositions about God and man, based on his teaching. Salvation was brought about as men trusted his love and power and sought his presence and obtained his mind. Scripture, doctrine, or creed only points the way to the revelation. They are not themselves that revelation.

Inspired Minds and Guided Events

Before the time of Jesus, and since, prophets have been specially endowed to observe God at work in the course of time: "Surely the Lord God will do nothing until he revealeth the secret unto his servants the prophets" (Amos 3: 7).

This process of revelation had two aspects. One was the actual intervention of God and his guidance of the events themselves; and the other was the inspiration which enabled the prophets to see, understand, and interpret that intervention in terms of the nature and purpose of God. This incidence of the inspired mind with the guided event constituted revelation.

God made the universe and gave it a law by which it is governed. That law is the expression of his eternal will which is vital and personal. He sustains all existences by the continual expression of his will working both from within nature and man and from above. The whole is one organism, informed, sustained and directed by one purpose, a purpose which is actual and supreme. We, the creatures of his creating, are in the midst of the process which we know as the universe, and are capable of understanding that process. We have emerged from it. Moreover we can, by means of such understanding, modify the process within limits, making it conform to our own wishes. So the process itself which brings forth minds such as ours must itself find its rise in a spiritual principle which is also a personal will, for "man is Spirit."

Since the activity of man-what he makes and does, what he hopes and strives for-reveals the man, so also does the universe reveal its creator. For "what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but [except he has] the Spirit of God" (I Corinthians 2: 11). This applies to a knowledge of Scripture.

So, then, all is of God. He makes the world and man. He guides the destiny of all, even though this involves great suffering to him-suffering consequenced upon man's rebellion. For, in the end, "nothing walks with aimless feet." The correspondence between what he does and the minds he inspires to recognize what he does is the principle of revelation. The expression of such correspondence may take many forms, and about them we shall have something more to say later. It is important now to assert that the origin of divine revelation is always in the action of the personal God, in whatever he says or does (which for him is the same thing) in nature or the course of human history. As such divine activity is apprehended, so the conditions of revelation are made actual.

On this general background we may discuss the specific and particular manifestations of God, such as the deliverance from Egypt or the appearances to Joseph Smith and others. All such seemingly miraculous events are but (to us) extraordinary manifestations of the divine mind, made necessary as he administers extraordinary situations created by his creatures. These events are, of course, consistent with his nature and with each other, but arresting enough in their character to create wonder and awe and to induce the spirit of worship in ordinary men. For the tendency in most of us is to regard the extraordinary as God's doing, and pass by unnoticed the normal rhythm of the universe. Such a sharp dividing line cannot justly be drawn. Unless God is revealed everywhere and always he cannot be disclosed anywhere at any time. Only if nothing is actually profane can anything be sacred. Unless God calls all peoples, he cannot choose any, for "All things are created and {under the divine enlightenment of the Holy Spirit} made to bear record of me" (Genesis 6: 66, I.V.).

Fragmentation Versus Wholeness

God is in all things. But such immanence is not that of a static mechanism induced by uniform procedures based on design. His indwelling is rather the manifestation of a living person. As a man is in his action in so far as a particular act may demand, so is God in his universe. Similarly, any man is more than what he does, and so God is above his world, as well as in it. His character is constant and perfect. No "variableness, neither shadow of turning" is a phrase which may fitly be used here. So, then, to maintain his purposive constancy he must vary his response to his creatures to conform to their need. No sane father gives his four-year-old son an open razor to play with, but he might rightly give the boy this a dozen years later with which to shave himself. Both the early withholding and the later giving demonstrates the constancy of the Father's concern. The selfsame character can be expressed in different ways depending on conditions which demand such expression. What applies to individuals applies to periods of time. The same God may find it necessary or desirable to express himself differently to immature peoples than to those more cultured. His ability to share himself is conditioned in the capacity we have to receive him. From the "flower in the crannied wall" to the wonder of the resurrection of our Lord-all is of God. All is not equally revelatory of the fullness of the divine nature, however. But the principle remains that whether ordinary or extraordinary, revelation is effected when an inspired mind impinges upon a divinely guided event.

A mind may be inspired as a result of training, as was the case when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, or when Adams, Leverrier, and Schmid discovered Neptune in the 1850's. If so inspired, the training itself is dependent upon what men have learned as they have observed the orderly processes of the universe and thought God's thoughts after him. Or a mind may be inspired by some swifter intuition, based on personal fellowship, as when Peter at Caesarea Philippi suddenly apprehended the divinity of our Lord. Again, inspiration may come, as often it does when the president of the church, grappling with the problems incidental to the discharge of his duty, finds himself "in the Spirit," or "commanded to write" or "in vision." So inspiration was with the founding fathers, those "wise men" who established the constitution of the United States.

The coincidence of mind and event which conditions revelation need not be contemporary. Events of past history can be revivified and made to tell the future-as illustrated when Jesus said, "As it was in the days of Noah-so shall it be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man." The God who guides history can also recreate that history in the minds he inspires to see and tell forth his nature. We are here touching upon the work of the Holy Spirit, or course. He who is in all, is also above all, and so enabled to see all. "All things are present with me," and "time only is measured unto man."

Grades of Revelation

All things and occurrences are not equally revelatory of the fullness of God, because he is neither a "thing" nor an "occurrence." It tells us something about his ceaseless creative power when we examine the nature of matter, or the intense fertility of insects, or the majesty of space. These manifestations are massive and necessary to our modern life. The origin of species and the advent of man also reveal his genius. But how infinitely much more does the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveal! God is personal. Only in a person can personality be completely apprehended and fully appreciated. We shall rejoice and be glad that our eyes have been opened to see the wonder of the universe, and our souls will be enriched as we bathe in the beauty his handiwork displays and inspires. We shall be grateful for his work in the course of time as we observe him judging, inspiring, blessing, and enriching men with a sense of the moral law, and enabling them to suffer and endure in their knowledge so that, to some extent, their vision has become embodied in the general will of mankind. But nothing can quite compare with the beauty, the truth, and the goodness demonstrated and vindicated in God's supreme manifestation known as the Lord Jesus Christ.

One of the tragedies of our world is that the manifestation of God has been fragmented. The scientist passionately pursues the truth as he measures, weighs, and evaluates physical and mathematical data. In our world his labors are unrelated to the supreme manifestation-Jesus. Likewise the artist and even sometimes the saint, keen on their own apprehension of the divine, fail to relate what they do to the Spirit of the whole, and in so many instances even their art and their goodness become the occasion whereby their separateness from others is emphasized. And as the man is divided within himself, so are men antagonistic to each other. The fundamental spirit of the age is wrong, and all are affected by it. Our age is brilliant, but men are afraid of each other. Our age is one of plenty, but 70 per cent of us live in perpetual hunger. Our age has the language of the redeemed-we talk of liberty, of equality, and of fraternity-but we are in danger of total destruction. We look for security and find only uncertainty. Science teaches us of the unity of nature, but in our behavior that unity is shattered. Armageddon is in the making, for our modern world presents the scientific embodiment of nature's resources in two antagonistic idea systems. One centers in Washington and the other in Moscow. Even the historical revelation of Jesus Christ has been fragmented and the fragments embodied in institutions and transmitted by tradition and practice. What men need is not more science or better art, nor even more religion. Men need a new spirit in which to view life, a spirit in which there is power and motivation to reorient life around the divine purpose. The spirit men need is the testimony of Jesus-the Spirit of prophecy.

This new spirit must be God's gift to men. Revelation in its larger aspect involves this heaven-sent gift. To derive inspiration from the work of God in nature is a form of his own revelation of himself. But to receive the revelation of Christ, as did Peter at Caesarea Philippi, is to receive something of the divine nature itself. Thus may be designated the distinction between inspiration and revelation. The former arises as man reflects the divine mind in the universe around him. The latter arises within man as God gives man something of himself. Inspiration "comes to" man. Revelation is kindled within him. Inspiration is like moonlight, revelation more like sunlight. One reflects light from an external luminous source. The other is itself the author or source of that illumination. The basic difference or distinction may be put in the following way. Men are inspired and uplifted as they are led to appreciate the work and wonder of the created order and as they discern the divine hand in the course of human history. Revelation not only inspires men, it reconstitutes them. It makes them new creatures. Revelation includes all that inspiration can mean of the quickening and enlightening of human nature. But it is something more. It is the bestowal of a new nature. It is not merely the enriching of the old man, it is the birth of a new one. Inspiration enriches life. Revelation transforms it. For revelation is significant not by the light that can be thrown upon it by science, art, morals, and philosophy, but by the radiance it sheds on these aspects of human endeavor. Inspiration is designed to lead men to the fuller revelation which comes when men are reborn.

The Gift of God

What is offered in revelation is not only truth about God, but God himself. Theologians may know a lot about the Divine. Saints know him. Thought inspired by God is good. But the thinker needs to worship ere he falls into the fatal error of setting up his thought of God as his God. And such thought of God, however correct, in such circumstances expresses pride and thus becomes a means of alienation from others. The music critic who never suspended his critical faculties and lost himself in the sheer enjoyment of sweet concourses of sound would lose his perspective. A theologian likewise who never worshiped would scarcely be worthy of the name, and his theology eventually become as "worthless as withered weeds." As a symphony is more than the sum total of its orchestration, key relations, themes and developments, so revelation is more than the truths and ideas distilled from it, valuable as these may be.

This is not to decry theology or doctrine. Far from it. A map will always be useful to the man who is going to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. But all the maps in the world will not enable the traveler to enjoy the breath-taking beauty of the canyon itself. The maps point the way; they are a symbol of a community of experience. Theology and doctrine point the way, like the map, and the map is very necessary in a world which has lost the way. But that is all they do-point the way. Unless they issue in communion with God they are "as idlest froth amid the bounding main." Actually the theologian must be also a saint or his thought of God will inevitably be erroneous.

The prophets of the Hebrew people in the first millennium B.C. went to school with a living God. The doctrine of ethical monotheism took the form of a conviction based on that schooling before it was a doctrine. It is most interesting that the Old Testament invites men to "taste and see how gracious the Lord is." It does not say "O think and believe." For the typical organ of revelation is the seer, not the thinker. This does not mean that the seer never thinks, or that the thinker is blind. It means that worship, in which man "tastes" or "experiences" the Divine, is primary, and that sight grows out of the moments when God and man are actually together. The vision of Isaiah illustrates this, as does that of Enos and Joseph Smith. It is the seer who beholds the glory of God, yes; but the center of such revelation is in the events he beholds. Such "seeing" is merely a response on man's part. God initiates the process. He it is who utters himself perpetually-so that there is "no end to my work, neither to my words." He it is whose utterance is objectified and made actual usward as it becomes incarnated in the universe around us. He it is whose spirit moves within us to correspond with and appreciate this objective utterance. He it is who comes down and incarnates himself in a human person so that, so far as we are concerned, the completeness of his manifestation of himself can be ours. Finally, he it is who initiates the total response of human nature to this complete utterance, in Jesus Christ, and constitutes in us the gift of the Holy Ghost.

Why is this so? Why cannot man of himself mount up to the knowledge of God? The answer is fairly simple. A geologist is one whose knowledge of earth's history enables him to formulate some idea as to the age and value of various strata of the earth's crust. He takes initiative in the acquisition of this knowledge. The initiative is wholly his. Knowledge of things always depends on the initiative being taken and held by the knower.

To know another person is a different and far more intricate business. If he refuses to let himself be known, there is little I can do about it. I can know him only as I can persuade him to know me. In this kind of knowledge the initiative is shared. Those of us who are blessed by the possession of many friends whom we know and love, and who know and love us, are aware of the fact that friendship is a joint affair.

But what can we do about knowing God? Nothing. Here the initiative must be wholly his. We respond to his love, but discover in responding, that we are simply giving him back something he gave first to us! The eternal God chooses to make himself known. He gives the desire to know him. To know him is to be like him. To be like him is to know as we are known. So we discover ourselves in him. In his light we see light. In his peace we are at peace. In his humility we are exalted. As he makes himself known to us, so others are to us made known, and the love wherewith he loves them is kindled in us, and we are led to endeavor for them what he has done for us. This is the supreme fact and justification of divine revelation-that it issues in charity. The pure love of Christ and its enkindling is the form of conduct which that love inspires.

Thus revelation is always life. It issues in the discovery of self in the sacrificial acts prompted by communion with God. So in a still larger way, revelation not only reveals the movement of God in history-it creates a history of its own, a history, induced, guided, and fulfilled only in the future it creates-the kingdom of God. God is the Supreme Revealer-and the glory and majesty of those things yet to be revealed are reserved for the development and nourishment of those who sacrifice and work for them. It could not be otherwise, because the fullness of divine love demands that we share with God what future there is in him. Our heavenly Father can do some things to men. He blesses them in hope when they will turn to him. He curses the rebellious, bringing pain to them in order to break up the selfishness such rebellion induces. But even that pain is the expression of his love as it seeks its own in the rebellious one. He brings evil on the wicked as a means of saving the wicked from themselves. If man will not sustain the revelation of God within him, he must endure the manifestation of God to him. While God does some things to men, the complete revelation of his will can only come about as God does things in and with men. Revelation involves a heaven-sent gift inducing a divine-human partnership, in which man yields himself subservient to the progressive revelation of his Father in his Father's endeavor.

That endeavor is, of course, the kingdom of God. Thus, "thy kingdom come" is not the expression of a wish for a sublime future-it is rather the dedication in utter love and trust of the soul to work for that future. To pray "thy kingdom come" means: "Lord, here am I, take me, and I am willing to be used in every way, not only for self, but for others, that they may be blessed as a result of my life."

The heart of the matter is here arrived at. Revelation reaches into the wills of men and secures them from all evil, saving them for the building up of the divine kingdom. To the building up of that kingdom-the fruitage of divine revelation-the Church of Jesus Christ is completely committed.