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? 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,