Him who is represented. Theories which confound this Natural Revelation with Positive Revelation, like Traditionalism, or with the Revelation of Glory, like Ontologism completely misapprehend the bearing and energy of God’s creative operations and of created nature itself.
II. The following propositions, met with in the Fathers, and even in Holy Scripture, must be understood to refer to a Natural Revelation. When rightly explained they serve to confirm the doctrine stated above.
1. “God is the Teacher of all truth, even of natural truth,” i.e. not by formal speech nor by an inner supernatural enlightenment, but by sustaining the mind and faculties with which He has endowed our nature (cf. St. August. De Magistro, and St. Thomas, De Veritate, q. XI.).
2. “God is the light in which we know all truth,” that is, not the light which we see, but the Light which creates and preserves in us the faculty of knowing things as they are.
3. “God is the truth in which we read all truth,”—not as in a book or as in a mirror, but in the sense that, by means of the light received from God, we read in creatures the truths impressed upon them. The same idea is sometimes expressed by saying that God impresses His truth upon our mind and writes it in our souls.
4. It is particularly said that God has written His law upon our hearts (Rom. 2:14, 15) and that He speaks to us in our conscience. This, however, does not mean a supernatural intervention; through the light of reason God makes known to us His Will in a more vivid manner than even human language could do.
III. Natural Revelation embraces all the truths which we can apprehend by the light of our reason. Nevertheless only those which concern God and our relations with Him are said to belong to Natural Revelation, because they are the only truths in which He reveals Himself to us and which He commands us to acknowledge. Thus St. Paul (Rom. 1:18–20 and 2:14–15) points out as naturally revealed “the invisible things of God,” especially “His eternal power and Divinity,” and also the Moral Law.
It must not, however, be thought that all that can be or
