And what had
they exactly in their several individual minds, when they delivered
their utterances? These are manifestly questions of historical fact,
and one does not see how the answer to them can decide offhand the
still further question: of what use should such a volume, with its
manner of coming into existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life
and a revelation? To answer this other question we must have already
in our mind some sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities
in a thing should be which give it value for purposes of revelation;
and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual
judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment, we might indeed
deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our
theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it,
must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of the
writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and
express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare
ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow
that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions
and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the
inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of
their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. You see
that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for
determining the value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism
accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem.
With the same conclusions of fact before them, some take one view, and
some another, of the Bible's value as a revelation, according as their
spiritual judgment as to the foundation of values differs.

I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because
there are many religious persons--some of you now present, possibly,
are among them--who do not yet make a working use of the distinction,
and who may therefore feel first a little startled at the purely
existential point of view from which in the following lectures the
phenomena of religious experience must be considered. When I handle
them biologically and psychologically as if they were mere curious
facts of individual history, some of you may think it a degradation of
so sublime a subject, and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets
more fully expressed, of deliberately se