We do not need to probe very deeply to find out how strongly religion
resists this attempt, and we easily discover what is the disturbing
element which awakens hostile feeling. It is of three kinds, and depends
on three characteristic aims and requirements of religion, which are
closely associated with one another, yet distinct from one another, though
it is not always easy to represent them in their true proportions and
relative values. The first of these interests seems to be "teleology," the
search after guiding ideas and purposes, after plan and directive control
in the whole machinery, that sets itself in sharp opposition to a mere
inquiry into proximate causes. Little or nothing is gained by knowing how
everything came about or must have come about; all interest lies in the
fact that everything has come about in such a way that it reveals
intention, wisdom, providence, and eternal meaning, realising itself in
details and in the whole. This has always been rightly regarded as the
true concern and interest of every religious conception of the world. But
it has been sometimes forgotten that this is by no means the only, or even
the primary interest that religion has in world-lore. We call it its
highest and ultimate interest, but we find, on careful study, that two
others are associated with and precede it.

For before all belief in Providence and in the divine meaning of the
world, indeed before faith at all, religion is primarily feeling--a deep,
humble consciousness of the entire dependence and conditionality of our
existence, and of all things. The belief we have spoken of is, in relation
to this feeling, merely a form--as yet not in itself religious. It is not
only the question "Have the world and existence a meaning, and are
phenomena governed by ideas and purposes?" that brings religion and its
antagonists into contact; there is a prior and deeper question. Is there
scope for this true inwardness of all religion, the power to comprehend
itself and all the world in humility in the light of that which is not of
the world, but is above world and existence? But this is seriously
affected by that doctrine which attempts to regard the Cosmos as
self-governing and self-sufficing, needing nothing, and failing in
nothing. It is this and not Darwinism or the descent from a Simian stock
that primarily troubles the religious spirit. It is more specially
sensitive to the strange and antagonistic tendency of naturalism sho