Now, it is not an arbitrary relation which unites and amalgamates these two elements in dogma; it is an organic and necessary relation. Go back for a moment to the origin of religious phenomena, and to the formation of the first and simplest doctrinal formulas. In presence of one of the great spectacles of Nature, man, feeling his weakness and dependence with respect to the mysterious power revealed in it, trembled with fear and hope. This is primitive religious emotion. But this emotion necessarily implies, for thought, a relation between the subject which experiences it and the object that has caused it. Now, thought, once awakened, will necessarily translate this relation into an intellectual judgment. Thus, wishing to express this relation, the believer will exclaim, _e.g._ "God is great!" marking the infinite disproportion between his being and the universal being which made him tremble.[1] He obeys the same necessity which makes him ordinarily express his thought in language. Religious emotion then is transformed in the mind into the notion of a relation, _i.e._ into an intellectual notion which becomes the expressive image or representation of the emotion. But the notion and the emotion are essentially different in nature. In expressing it, and thanks to the imagination, the notion may renew or fortify the emotion, and dogma may awaken piety; but the two must not be confounded. The notion is like an algebraic expression which ideally represents a given quantity, but it is not the quantity itself. This must be clearly kept in mind if we are to avoid the most disastrous confusions. In religion and in dogma the intellectual element is simply the expression or envelope of the religious experience.... [1] It might be supposed that I make of this elementary experience the primary root whence all dogmas, including the Christian, have sprung by a process of evolution. Nothing of the kind. This is but a particular example. The revelation of Nature is the principle of the dogmas of the Religions of Nature. Christianity has behind it another revelation and other experiences: the revelation of God and of a higher life, in the historical appearance of Jesus Christ. Let a man morally prepared to hear the Gospel begin to follow Him, listen to His words, penetrate His soul, comprehend His death, and he will cry out: "God is Love!" as the spectator of Nature was supposed to exclaim: "God is great!" And this new proposition, translating a new religious relation, will, in its turn, become the principle of all Christian dogmas.