The idea of symbol and the idea of mystery are correlative. Who says symbol says at the same time occultation and revelation. In becoming present and even sensible, the living verity still remains veiled. The same image that reveals it to the heart remains for the intellect an impassable barrier. One may say of it what the poet says of the sense of the infinite, for, at bottom, it is the same thing. "We are restless because we see it but can never comprehend it." This inquietude is soothed by a clear knowledge of the cause from which it springs. Symbols are the only language suited to religion. We need to know that which we adore; for no one adores that of which he has no perception; but it is not less necessary that we should not comprehend it, for one does not adore that which he comprehends too clearly, because to comprehend is to dominate. Such is the twofold and contradictory condition of piety, to which symbols seem to be made expressly in order to respond. Piety has never had any other language. In considerations of this kind might be found the explanation of the bond which in the beginning unites religion and art. But we must confine ourselves to our special topic, and proceed to inquire what it is that constitutes the life and power of religious symbols. It would be an illusion to believe that a religious symbol represents God in Himself, and that its value, therefore, depends on the exactitude with which it represents Him. The true content of the symbol is entirely subjective: it is the conscious relation of the subject to God, or rather, it is the way he feels himself affected by God. Thus when the Psalmist exclaims: "The Lord is my rock"; or "God is a devouring fire"; when the Christ teaches us to say, "Our Father,"--these are not scientific, and in this case metaphysical, definitions of God. What these images simply translate is the relation of absolute confidence, of awe, of filial love, which, by His mysterious action, the Spirit of God creates in revealing Himself in the spirit of man. From these divers feelings spring spontaneously the strong and simple images which translate them, and which, if these subjective experiences are eliminated, have no content and no truth. From this point of view we may see in what religious inspiration psychologically consists. Neither its aim nor its effect is to communicate to men exact, objective, ready-made ideas on that which by its nature is unknowable under the scientific mode; but it consists in an enrichment and exaltation of the inner life of its subject; it sets in motion his inward religious activity, since it is in that that God reveals Himself; it excites new feelings, constituting new concrete relations of God to man, and by the fact of this creative activity it spontaneously engenders new images and new symbols, of which the real content is precisely this revelation of the God-spirit in the inner life of the spirit of man.