(_d_) With this external record we shall also see that there is given under proper conditions a special influence of God's Spirit, so to quicken our cognitive powers that the external record reproduces in our minds the ideas with which the minds of the writers were at first divinely filled.
We may illustrate the need of internal revelation from Egyptology, which is impossible so long as the external revelation in the hieroglyphics is uninterpreted; from the ticking of the clock in a dark room, where only the lit candle enables us to tell the time; from the landscape spread out around the Rigi in Switzerland, invisible until the first rays of the sun touch the snowy mountain peaks. External revelation ({ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH OXIA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, _Rom. 1:19, 20_) must be supplemented by internal revelation ({ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER PSI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, _1 Cor. 2:10, 12_). Christ is the organ of external, the Holy Spirit the organ of internal, revelation. In Christ (_2 Cor. 1:20_) are "the yea" and "the Amen"--the objective certainty and the subjective certitude, the reality and the realization.
Objective certainty must become subjective certitude in order to be a scientific theology. Before conversion we have the first, the external truth of Christ; only at conversion and after conversion do we have the second, "Christ formed in us"_ (Gal. 4:19)_. We have objective revelation at Sinai (_Ex. 20:22_); subjective revelation in Elisha's knowledge of Gehazi (_2 K. 5:26_). James Russell Lowell, Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire: "Therefore with thee I love to read Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs Life in the withered words! how swift recede Time's shadows! and how glows again Through its dead mass the incandescent verse, As when upon the anvil of the brain It glittering lay, cyclopically wrought By the fast throbbing hammers of the poet's thought!"