t instructive need not then be sought for in the haunts of
special erudition--they lie along the beaten highway; and this
circumstance, which flows so naturally from the character of our
problem, suits admirably also your lecturer's lack of special
theological learning. I may take my citations, my sentences and
paragraphs of personal confession, from books that most of you at some
time will have had already in your hands, and yet this will be no
detriment to the value of my conclusions. It is true that some more
adventurous reader and investigator, lecturing here in future, may
unearth from the shelves of libraries documents that will make a more
delectable and curious entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I
doubt whether he will necessarily, by his control of so much more
out-of-the-way material, get much closer to the essence of the matter
in hand.

The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question,
What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different
orders of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to
recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist
upon the point a little before we enter into the documents and
materials to which I have referred.

In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of
inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did
it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And
second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it
is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential
judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of
value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we
like, denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced
immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual
preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first
separately, and then adding them together.

In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the
two orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and
its derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the
higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this
existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church.
Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring
forth their various contributions to the holy volume?