There
can be no doubt that God can and does manifest to chosen souls hidden things in
addition to what He teaches through the public ministry of His Church. It is
also an accepted truth that He sometimes reveals them to his friends for the
express purpose of communicating this extra knowledge to other well disposed
persons through the natural and human means at the disposal of those receiving
his revelations. These manifestations He invariably surrounds with enough evidence
to satisfy all requirements of a cautious and well founded human belief.
The
existence of the Bible justifies the query, whether there are not other books
that have been written under supernatural guidance, though we know of course
that none of them can ever have the same importance and authenticity as the
Bible. For the Bible was provided as the record of the general revelations of
God to mankind at all its stages to the end of times.
There
are some vast truths outside the range of natural human knowledge and not
specially revealed in the Scripture. History proves that God, for special
purposes, often grants to his friends higher insight into supernatural truths
and facts, which, if at his command they are recorded in writing, are intended
by Him as an additional source of higher knowledge and well deserve to be
considered as private revelations.
On
the other hand there are many things written in the scripture not fully
expatiated on but said in a taciturn manner. For example the creation of the
angels not fully narrated as the creation of the first man and the first woman
and the propagation of the human race was narrated. Also the doctrine of the
Blessed Trinity not mentioned in a straight statement in the scripture. “But there are also many other things which Jesus did;
which, if they were written every one, the world itself, I think, would not be
able to contain the books that should be written.” (John 21: 25). God could decide to revealed more or expatiate
on certain things of such for more understanding and for the well being of His
true religious. Many of these revelations if not all are mysteries to us which
God now shed light on for the good of our souls.
God
did not revealed these mysteries so early in the Church, because they are so
great, that the faithful would have been lost in the contemplation and
admiration of them at a time when it was more necessary to establish firmly the
law of grace and of the Gospel. Because human ignorance might have suffered recoil
and doubt at their magnitude, when faith in the Incarnation and Redemption and
the precepts of the new law of the Gospel were yet in their beginnings. On this
same account Jesus Christ said to his disciples at the last supper: “Many
things have I to say to you; but you are not yet disposed to receive them ...”
(John 16, 12). But now, we have greater need for these manifestations.
