authority for universal faith and life in the way that Scripture does, and as we noted above, Scripture shows us, from the case of Paul and Agabus, that fresh information from God about the future is not always meant to change our convictions about what we should be doing in the present. This, however, is not to deny that “private revelations,” as the Puritans used to call them, ever take place nowadays. On that question we keep an open mind. Though we know that self-deception here is very easy,