What does he _mean_ by saying that he has had a "revelation ?" Did he see a sight, or hear a sound?
or was it an inward impression?
and how does he distinguish it as divine ?[4] Until these questions are fully answered, we have no materials at all before us for deciding to accept his results: to believe him, merely because he is earnest and persuaded, would be judged to indicate the weakness of inexperience.

How then can it be pretended that we have, or can possibly get, the means of assuring ourselves that the apostles held correct principles of evidence and applied them justly, when we are not able to interrogate them?
Farther, it appears that _our_ experience of delusion forces us to enact a very severe test of supernatural revelation.

No doubt, we can conceive that which is equivalent to a _new sense_ opening to us; but then it must have verifications connecting it with the other senses.
Thus, a particularly vivid sort of dream recurring with special marks, and communicating at once heavenly and earthly knowledge, of which the latter was otherwise verified, would probably be admitted as a valid sort of evidence: but so intense would be the interest and duty to have all unravelled and probed to the bottom, that we should think it impossible to verify the new sense too anxiously, and we should demand the fullest particulars of the divine transaction.

On the contrary, it is undeniable that all such severity of research is rebuked in the Scriptures as unbelief.

The deeply interesting _process_ of receiving supernatural revelation .-- a revelation, _not_ of moral principles, but of outward facts and events, supposed to be communicated in a mode wholly peculiar and unknown to common men,--this process, which ought to be laid open and analyzed under the fullest light, _if we are to believe the results at second hand_, is always and avowedly shrouded in impenetrable darkness.