Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/24

Rh the light of religious interests. For our second conception Natural Religion is viewed simply as the voice of human nature itself, whose faith is to be expressed, whose ideals are to be recorded, whose will and whose needs are to be, above all, consulted and portrayed, since, for this view, the consciousness of those who believe in religious truth is, when once made articulate, its own apology. But, for our third conception, the office of the student of Natural Religion is to deal with the most fundamental metaphysical problems. He is for this view a thorough-going critic of the foundations of our faith, and of the means of our insight into the true nature of Reality.

All these three conceptions, however much they may differ, have in common what makes it proper enough to view them as conceptions of the study of Natural Religion. For they are all three concerned with religion; they can all alike be pursued without explicit dependence upon any creed as to a revealed religion; and finally, they are busied about some relation between the natural order of truth and the contents of religious doctrine. They differ in the sort of natural truth that forms their starting-point, or that limits the scope of the investigation which they propose. I suppose that no one of these various lines of inquiry will ever come to be wholly neglected. But their office is distinct. And I mention them here in order all the more clearly to say, at the outset, that our own business, in these lectures, is with the most neglected and arduous of the methods of studying the relations between religion and the ultimate problems of the Theory of Being. From the first, to be sure, we shall be concerned, in one sense, with human