llectual use of the Bible, in critical and historical studies, is
legitimate and needful. Reason should lay the bases for faith. Knowledge
must rear the altar on which worship is to be lighted. Theology shapes
religion. It is all important, therefore, that the books which the
intellect chiefly uses to found and form its thoughts of God should be
rightly used, so as to give man right conceptions of the Divine Being, and
to waken right feelings toward Him. This intellectual use of the Bible is
not for scholars alone. There is no longer any isolated class of scholars.
All educated people are now taken into the confidence of the learned, in
every sphere of knowledge. The average man will reason about the great
mysteries quite as much as the scholar; perhaps more than the true
scholar, and with more insistent dogmatism. To the issue of that simpler,
nobler Religion of Christ which is struggling to the birth within the
womb of Christianity, in the travail throes that are upon our age, it is
of vital moment that all intelligent people should learn to use their
Bibles intelligently in a knowledge of the nature of its writings, and in
reasonable reasonings therefrom. Therefore I have spoken concerning the
critical and the historical uses of these sacred writings.

But, when this knowledge is won and duly employed in our theologizings,
the truest use of the Bible remains for us to make, to our highest
pleasure and profit. It is the book of religion, not of theology; save as
it records the one authoritative Epistle of Theology, the Word of God, the
Christ. It is not a body of divinity, it is the soul of divinity. To use
the Bible critically and historically for our theologizings, is, after
all, to use it, however rightly, for its secondary and not its primary
purpose. Religion--as the awed sense of the Eternal Power and Order
revealed in nature, the Infinite Goodness and Righteousness revealed in
man--is the art of the soul; its finest feelings, its loftiest
imaginations, its noblest enthusiasms its profoundest tragedies thrown out
into the cry of the human after God.

There is a science in the sculptor's art. It is doubtless needful that
this art should be studied for the sake of its science. Artists, however,
may be glad that Winckelmann has analyzed the Apollo Belvedere, and has
given them the laws of proportion deduced from this human form divine;
leaving them free to feast upon its beauty. For in the scientific study of
art,