t to be discovered by any scientific
consideration of nature or interpretation of the world. It is, however, at
the same time obvious that all apologetic must follow religion, and can
never precede it. Religion can only be awakened, never coerced. Once
awakened, it can reflect on its validity and freedom; but it alone can
really understand both. And apart from religion, or without its presence,
all apologetic endeavours are gratuitous, and are, moreover, expressly
forbidden by its own highest authorities (Matt. xxiii. 15).

The second point is even more important. Religion does not hold its theory
of the world and its interpretations of the nature and meaning of things
in the same way as poetry does its fine-spun, airy dreams, whose chief
value lies in the fact that they call up moods and arouse a play of
feeling, and which may be grave or gay, elegiac or idyllic, charming or
sublime, but may be true or false indifferently.

For there is this outstanding difference between religion and all
"moods"--all poetic or fanciful views of nature--that it lives by the
certainty of its ideas, suffers if they be uncertain, and dies if they be
shown to be untenable, however charming or consoling, sublime or simple
they may be. Its theories of the world are not poems; they are
convictions, and these require to be first of all not pleasing but true.
(Hence it is that criticism may arise out of religion itself, since
religion seeks for its own sake to find secure foundations.) And in this
respect the religious conception of the world is quite in line with
world-theory in general. Both desire to express reality. They do not wish
to lay gaily-coloured wreaths and garlands about reality that they may
enjoy it, plunged in their respective moods; they desire to understand it
and give an account of it.

But there is at once apparent a characteristic difference between the
propositions and conclusions of the religious view and those of the
secular, a difference not so much of content, which goes without saying,
but in the whole form, manner and method, and tone. As Schleiermacher put
it: "You can never say that it advances with the sure tread" of which
science in general is capable, and by which it is recognisable. The web of
religious certainty is much more finely and delicately woven, and more
susceptible of injury than the more robust one of ordinary knowledge.
Moreover, where religious certainty has attained its highest point in a
belie