In vain do they appear to deduce this scholastic theory from the Bible; it is simply an unfaithful translation of the Biblical notion. They tear up from the soil of the religious life the revelation of God in order to constitute it into a body of supernatural verities, subsisting by itself, to which they make it an obligation and a merit to adhere, silencing, if needs be, both the judgment and the conscience. Faith, which, in the Bible, was an act of confidence and consecration to God, becomes an intellectual adherence to an historical testimony or to a doctrinal formula. A mortal dualism starts up in religion. It is admitted that orthodoxy may exist apart from piety, that a man may obtain and possess the object of faith apart from the conditions that faith presupposes, and, at a push, serve divine truth while inwardly an unbeliever and a reprobate. Get rid of this illusion, frivolous and irreligious man! Whatever your authorities in earth or heaven, you are not in the truth, because you are not in piety. God has not spoken anything to you. To the prophets He has spoken, doubtless, and to Christ and the apostles and the saints; to you He still remains a stranger and unknown. His revelation has not been to you a light, for you are walking in darkness. You are like the Jews who built the tombs of the prophets and crowned their memory with empty honours. Had you been living in the time of the men of God, you would have been the first to stone them.

This idea of revelation is at bottom entirely pagan. In the region of authentic Christianity you cannot separate the revealing act of God from His redeeming and sanctifying action. God does not enlighten, on the contrary He blinds those whom He does not save or sanctify. Let us boldly conclude, therefore, against all traditional orthodoxies, that the object of the revelation of God could only be God Himself, that is to say the sense of His presence in us, awakening our soul to the life of righteousness and love. When the word of God does not give us life, it gives us nothing. It is true that that presence and that action of the divine Spirit in our hearts become in them a light whose rays illumine all the faculties of the soul. But do not hope to enjoy that light apart from the central sun from which it flows.

The scholastic notion is not only irreligious; it is anti-psychological. In entering the human understanding this supernatural knowledge introduces into it a hopeless dualism. The sacred sciences are set up alongside the profane sciences without its being possible to organise them together into a coherent and harmonious body, for they are not of the same nature, they do not proceed from the same method, they do not accept the same control. You have thus a sacred cosmogony and a profane cosmogony, a sacred history of the origins of man and a purely human history of his beginnings, and of his first adventures, a divine metaphysic and another purely rational. How to make them live together and unite them? If, by a subtle theology, you succeed in rationalising dogma, do you not see that you destroy it in its very essence? If you demonstrate that it is essentially irrational, do you not feel that you are instituting an endless warfare between the authority of dogma and the authority of reason? One remembers the generous attempt of mediæval scholasticism, taken up again by the Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century, and one has not forgotten its twice fatal issue. One would need to have no notion of the laws of human thought to be astonished at it. Nominalism in the fifteenth century and rationalism in the eighteenth were the two natural heirs of orthodoxy.

The intervention of miracle as a criterion or proof of doctrine does not remove the difficulties of the theory; it multiplies and aggravates them. In consequence of the lapse of time, the incertitude of the documents, and the demands of modern thought, miracle, which formerly established the truth of religion, has become much more difficult to demonstrate than religion itself. The relation between the two has been reversed. The foundation of the edifice has become more ruinous than the building. Examples? Consider, then, on the one hand, the Decalogue, and on the other the thunders and lightnings of Sinai. Peals of thunder may have served to convince the Hebrews that the law of Moses came from the Eternal; for they looked upon thunder as revealing the presence, in some sort material and local, of their God. But who does not see that it is much easier to-day to prove the excellence and the truth of the Ten Words of the Law than the divine character of the most terrible of tempests? Make the opposite experiment: you are familiar with the Books of Joshua, Judges, Kings. You have read in them those orders issued by Jehovah for the total extermination of peoples whose crime was the defence of their country against the invaders. Prodigies abound in them: the walls of Jericho fall down at the sound of trumpets, etc., etc. Are these events sufficient to warrant us in admitting the affirmation of the Hebrew historian that these terrible reprisals, these crimes and violences, which were then common in all the Semitic tribes, were commanded either by the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ or by the impartial God of the universe? Our conscience resists and protests. Prodigies the most brilliant cannot make it do violence to itself or bend the law of righteousness and love beneath any manifestation, however striking, of brute force. Let us go further; let us come to the miracles of Christ. Let us interrogate the best Christians of our time: let us ask ourselves, Is it the cures that Jesus wrought which make us believe to-day in the divine truth of His word or which give authority to the Sermon on the Mount? Is it not rather the Gospel that helps us to believe in the miracles by persuading us that a man who spake like this man must have been able to do things and work works as beautiful and as wonderful as the words which He spoke? The most conservative Apologists of the traditional school confess to-day that miracle has lost its evidential force; it might move those who witnessed it, but its action and its prestige have necessarily been diminishing day by day for the generations which have followed them.

What if we were to press the idea of miracle itself which is in process of vanishing in proportion as the idea of Nature is transformed? What is Nature? Who knows its secrets and its limits? The theory of the evolution of things and beings, does it not show Nature to us as in travail, and as if perpetually giving birth to marvels? And if this creative energy which is in it can only religiously be referred to the constant activity of God in the universe and in history, how can we still oppose the laws of Nature to the will of God? Moreover, nothing is to-day more indeterminate, more impossible to define than the notion of miracle; it floats without ever being able to fix itself, between the idea of an absolute violation of the laws of Nature now no longer witnessed anywhere, to that entirely relative one of an extraordinary event, which, seeing that it may be encountered everywhere, no longer proves anything.

Lastly, if from the object and the criterion of revelation, we pass to the form which conserves and warrants it, i.e. to the Bible, questions become still more numerous and insoluble. In the seventeenth century the notion of the Bible and that of revelation were coincident and commensurate. But this identity depended upon two dogmas much impaired to-day. The one was the divine origin of the two Biblical Canons, i.e. of the Old and New Testaments: the other, the verbal inspiration of all holy Scripture, considered as divinely dictated.

History and exegesis have dissipated the illusions and the ignorance on which these two strange affirmations rested. The Bible appears to us as the work, slowly and laboriously constructed, of the ancient Jewish Synagogue, and of the Early Christian Church. It needed more than four centuries to establish and to delimitate the New