When the turbaned Oriental, standing in his mosque, pronounces the name of _Allah_ with such awe and joy, what is it he means? In his groping way he is aiming to be scientific; he is trying his hand at philosophy; he wishes to put his finger upon the nerve of the universe; he is trying to bring the multifarious forces of nature about him into a focus; he is trying to evolve harmony out of chaos,--music out of the discord and babel of life; and he thinks he has succeeded, when he has pronounced the word _Allah!_ Of course, his philosophy is that of a beginner, but it is a philosophy, nevertheless. He is an embryo scientist, taking his first lesson in logical reasoning. That is the truth at the heart of all religions which we must recognize. They represent the desire of man to make things clear to his intelligence, and to wrest life's secret from the universe. Man seeks knowledge because in the consciousness of knowledge there is happiness and power. The strain of ignorance is intolerable to him. Darkness embarrasses his mind and he seeks the light by instinct. The primitive man, for instance, alarmed by the things he did not understand, proposed explanation after explanation, in his effort to throw off the darkness from his mind. When the sky frowned upon him and the winds wailed in his ears, he did not know what to make of them, and felt insecure until he could satisfy himself that he understood how and why the dark clouds swept over the face of the skies and the winds moaned about his dwelling. He felt relieved when he believed that he had grasped the situation. His explanation that the sun and the wind were free agents, like himself, acting from choice, as he thought he did, was a very crude one, but it was an explanation, all the same, and for the time being proved helpful to him. From the very beginning, man has shown a hunger for knowledge, which has put his mind in action. Religion, then, is man's first attempt at scientific and philosophical thinking. Religion is, in a sense, the primer of science and philosophy. The mistake we make is to declare this primer infallible. We take the first composition of the child, so to speak--his first prattle in the presence of the universe--and pronounce it inspired. When Moses, or whoever wrote the first chapters of the book of Genesis, described how man and woman were fashioned, he was trying to be scientific, in his modest way. But the best explanation that his mentality could produce was that God took some clay from the ground and kneaded it into the form of man, and from one of the ribs of this man he formed woman. It is not his science we commend; it is his desire to explain man's origin that honors him, for out of that desire, philosophy, science,--progress--are born.