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