Delivered over the course of 1891 and 1893, George Gabriel Stokes's Gifford Lectures focused on the question of Divine Design, which he defined as God's Will and creation itself. Stokes contrasts Design with materialism, which posits that all life and all inorganic phenomena are caused by natural laws, and nothing more. Stokes rebuts that view by arguing a materialistic conception of the universe cannot explain why certain natural laws exist, such as the law of gravitation. It can only describe the phenomena we observe in the form of mathematical theories.

In The Evolution of Religion, vol. 1, Caird establishes the continuum of the science and evolution of religion and endeavours to show that the definition or idea of religion cannot be found in any element common to all religions, of which the author discusses both objective and subjective types. In addition to summarizing views of subjective and objective religion, Caird discusses the moral strength of subjective religion and the opposition of the spirit to nature. He also addresses the transition from a national to a universal religion as well as the rise of moral individualism.

In a positivist, perhaps unconscious approach, in his The Making of Religion, Andrew Lang begins with the ‘mystical phenomena of savage life’ and ends by saying ‘the exclusive Theism of Israel receives its complement in a purified Animism, and emerges as Christianity.’

Anthropological Religion, F. Max Müller’s third course of Gifford Lectures, concerns the study of that historical manifestation of natural religion founded upon the nature of man; more precisely, upon the discovery of some divine or infinite character within man, beyond the material body. Through the comparative study of conceptions of the soul and the afterlife, Müller considers instances of ancestor worship as likely the earliest indication of humankind’s recognition of something not merely human, something not far removed from the divine, in man.

F. Max Müller’s second round of Gifford Lectures, delivered before the University of Glasgow in the beginning of 1890, builds on the introductory material laid out in his first course, Natural Religion, now taking as his focus Physical Religion. Müller defines physical religion as a worship of the powers of nature.